oracle business intelligence 11g bi as a service – go outdoors as a... · oracle business...

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

BI as a Service – GO Outdoors Antony Heljula December 2013

© Peak Indicators Limited 2

BI as a Service – GO Outdoors Aim of Presentation

• This presentation will provide a high-level overview of the Business Analytics story at GO Outdoors

• We will describe the Business Case and design behind an innovative “private cloud” deployed by Go Outdoors using the latest hardware, software and virtualization technologies from Oracle


About this Presentation BI as a Service – GO Outdoors

• About GO Outdoors • BI as a Service

• Hardware • Dedicated Storage • Virtualisation • Database Optimisation • Resilience/DR

• The Results • Conclusion


BI as a Service – GO Outdoors

About GO Outdoors


About GO Outdoors The UK’s Biggest Outdoor Stores

• First opened in 1969 • HQ in Sheffield, UK • More than 40 stores nationwide • Market Leading Brands covering a wide

range of outdoor activities • Visit www.gooutdoors.co.uk

http://www.gooutdoors.co.uk/


About GO Outdoors Previous Infrastructure / Setup

Oracle BI Version 11.1.1.5

No. of Users 40

Data Warehouse Oracle Database EE 10G

Data Volumes 230GB

Platform Linux

Overnight ETL 5.5 hours for ETL into Data Warehouse + 0.5 hours for building OBI Aggregates

Dashboards/Reports (approx) 10 / 100

Subject Areas (example) Sales, Stock, POs, Budgeting, Deliveries, Customers, Supplier


About GO Outdoors A New Data Centre, A New Beginning

• Mid-way through 2013, GO Outdoors chose to move servers to a new set of Data Centres

• GO Outdoors were also intending to triple the number of OBI users

• A new set of hardware was required for the Oracle Data Warehouse and Oracle Business Intelligence

• How do we design the new infrastructure to deliver performance gains, increase scalability and reduce costs?



BI as a Service


BI as a Service What do we mean?

• “The Cloud” is a common term nowadays, lots of companies are not putting their applications “in the cloud” to reduce infrastructure costs

• Go Outdoors preferred to keep their Business Analytics and Data Warehouse infrastructure on-site (in their new Data Centre)

• Just because you cannot use a “public cloud” it doesn’t mean you cannot achieve all the same benefits with your own “private cloud”

• We will now describe the innovative architecture/infrastructure designed by the team at GO Outdoors to deliver their own scalable, flexible and optimised “private cloud”: BI as a Service


BI as a Service Your own “Private Cloud” Infrastructure

• Any cloud offering should deliver the following benefits: • Virtualized infrastructure • Increase capacity on-demand • Support for all types of Oracle license metric (Named User, CPU etc) • Provisioning of new environments within minutes • Improve overall performance • Use zero-maintenance performance features • Full resilience / DR • Lower infrastructure / administration costs


BI as a Service Why Infrastructure needs to be Modernised

Oracle Business

Intelligence

Data Storage

Business Customer

Application / Middleware

Data Warehouse

Business users need faster delivery, agile

framework, more data, faster reports….IT

departments struggle to keep up with demand

Even with virtualized platforms, Organisations continue to take

weeks/months to build new environments, resulting in delays and bottlenecks

Data Warehouses need greater memory capacity and faster CPUs to

support growing workloads. “Old” Virtualization technologies

actually makes databases run slower

SAN storage is there to serve the masses (10s or 100s of applications).

SAN Administrators not keen on allocating dedicated storage in an extremely optimised configuration (lots of disks). New technologies

e.g. SSD also available to the market


BI as a Service

Infrastructure Decisions

• We will now consider the decisions made at GO Outdoors which enabled them to deliver the “BI as a Service” private cloud • Hardware / Storage • Virtualization • Database Optimisation • Resilience / DR


BI as a Service Hardware / Storage

• GO Outdoors chose a private cloud 100% powered by Oracle • Oracle Software, Oracle Hardware, Oracle Virtualization • Single vendor for all support

• Comprehensive range of hardware options available

• Infrastructure based on the Oracle Sun X3-2L:

10x more Memory than existing platform 50% faster CPUs Large array of disks for striping data, high-performance configuration Less rack space than existing system Spare capacity to grow “on-demand” as the Business grows In-built resilience (dual-everything)


BI as a Service Oracle Sun Hardware – Added Value

• Integrated Lights-Out Management (ILOM) • Remote console & management capabilities • Accessible even when server is powered off

• Oracle ASR (Auto Service Request)

• Server is connected direct to Oracle support • Service Requests automatically created if any hardware component fails • Engineers called out automatically to replace failed component • Email / SNMP alerts generated whenever there is a warning or failure


BI as a Service Virtualization

• Oracle VM Server chosen as the virtualisation platform • Freely available (Oracle Support is a cost option)

• Supports all Oracle licensing models (Named User, CPU, Hard Partitioning etc)

• Maximises the value of your Oracle licenses

• Fantastic cloning capability & performance:

• Ability to create new Oracle BI environments in minutes

• Extremely flexible, facilitates High-Availability and Disaster Recovery

• It also has a very important feature for database performance: Para-Virtualization


BI as a Service Typical Problems with a Cloud/Virtualized Infrastructure

• Virtualization brings many benefits such as cloning, centralised administration, resource management etc

• But for databases it can have a big performance implication

• The “virtualization” layer slows down data I/O throughput – it makes your databases slower!

• Oracle VM provides the solution

OPERATING SYSTEM

SOFTWARE

DATA

Virtual Machine V I R T U A L I Z A T I O N

S T O R A G E


BI as a Service “Para-Virtualization” with Oracle VM Server

• Oracle VM comes with a unique “para-virtualization” feature:

• OS and Software are virtualized but your data bypasses the “virtualization” layer completely

• You get all the benefits of virtualization but your database still delivers the performance of raw physical storage!

OPERATING SYSTEM

SOFTWARE

DATA


S T O R A G E


BI as a Service “Para-Virtualization” with Oracle VM Server

• This is what it looks like in Oracle VM:

OS and Software are mounted as “virtual disks”

Database “Data” disks are mounted as raw physical devices


BI as a Service Database Optimisation

• For a flexible and optimised cloud infrastructure you need to use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

• Simpler than using OS file systems for data storage, delivers faster I/O

OPERATING SYSTEM

SOFTWARE

DATA


S T O R A G E

A S M


BI as a Service Database Optimisation – Oracle ASM

• For a flexible and optimised cloud infrastructure you need to use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

• Simpler than using OS file systems for data storage, delivers faster I/O

• Evenly distributes (stripes) data across you disks, delivers predictable performance

• Ability to add / resize / drop disks when the database is online – important for cloud scalability and flexibility

…..

DW Live DW Test

Oracle ASM

NOTE: Oracle ASM is freely available with the Oracle Database


BI as a Service Database Optimisation

• With any cloud infrastructure, you need to benefit from “zero-maintenance” performance features

• With 11g R2, the configuration and management of Parallel Query is now 100% automated

• Go Outdoors upgraded to 11g R2 without needing to change a line of code. It delivered significant performance gains (discussed later)

OPERATING SYSTEM

SOFTWARE

DATA


S T O R A G E

P Q

A S M


BI as a Service

Virtualized Configuration

• With Oracle VM, Go Outdoors were able to implement a flexible platform that catered for a blend of licensing metrics and also future capacity

• Dedicated resources for each application – no contention

Oracle Database: 6 x CPU cores “hard partitioned” 192GB RAM 24 x Disks (14TB total storage)

Oracle Business Intelligence: 6 x CPU cores “named user” 24GB RAM

2 x Disks

Spare Capacity: 4 CPU cores / 40GB RAM


BI as a Service Resilience / DR

• Every organisation adopts different policies regarding High-Availability (HA) clustering and Disaster Recovery (DR)

• Implementing HA and DR increases your infrastructure and operational costs

• GO Outdoors made two key decisions:

• HA Clustering not required: The virtualised hardware platform has good levels of built-in resilience

• DR required but a 24 hour SLA should be enforced

• With a 24 hour SLA, a simple and low-cost DR solution could be implemented


BI as a Service

Resilience / DR • Backups:

• Full DB export every 12 hours • RMAN backups provide

“point-in-time” recovery • Oracle BI backups handled by

Oracle VM

• All controlled by Oracle Database “Grid Control”

• Backups streamed over to secondary data centre

OPERATING SYSTEM

SOFTWARE

DATA


S T O R A G E

P Q

A S M

RMAN


BI as a Service Benefits for GO Outdoors

10x more memory / 50% faster CPUs “Free” upgrade to the latest Oracle BI and Database versions Dedicated local storage – configured for high performance No more storage/resource contention with other applications New Oracle BI environments provisioned “on-demand” in minutes Sufficient capacity to easily cater for 3x more users and future growth Less rack space / Lower infrastructure costs Automated parallel query / Automated Storage Management (ASM) Automated SR generation / Automated Engineer Call-out Improved backup & recovery



The Results


The Results Overnight ETL

• Prior to the migration, the process of loading the Data Warehosue each night from the source ERP system took approx. 5.5 hours

• No room for manoeuvre: • No time for adding new feeds into the DW • No time for backups

• After the migration to the new infrastructure:

2 hours (no rewrite of code)

Overnight ETL:

2.7x Faster


The Results Building the OBI Aggregates

• Prior to the migration, the process to incrementally update the OBI Aggregates was taking 30 minutes

• After the migration to the new infrastructure: 5 minutes (no rewrite of code)

OBI Aggregate

Build: 6x Faster


The Results Query Performance

• Prior to the migration, there was a key report that was developed by the Business users and run once every Monday morning

• It was taking 27 minutes to run

• After the migration to the new infrastructure: 45 Seconds

(no rewrite of code)

Key Business Report:

36x Faster



Conclusion


Conclusion BI as a Service

• All organisations have the ability to build their own private-cloud infrastructure and deliver significant business value

• Oracle provides all the capability: Software, Hardware, Virtualization

• Key tips: • Modernise your hardware (lots of memory, fast CPUs)

• Use dedicated storage, configured for high-performance • Virtualize using Oracle VM for high-performance • Para-virtualize your database “data” • Use the opportunity to upgrade to the latest software versions • Adopt key low-maintenance performance features (Auto Parallel Query, Oracle ASM)


BI as a Service Real Business Value

Helping Your Business Intelligence Journey

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