ALROSA is well known - it is one of the world's largest producers of gem-quality and industrial diamonds, writes Andrey Tischenko in an article published by www.iemag.ru. Since 2012, ALROSA is using SAP and Oracle software solutions within the ERP organizational strategy. In the course of developing the ERP Project for the diamond miner there emerged a new architectural concept able to meet company’s key production and management needs taking into account the necessity for introducing new business processes and as a consequence high requirements for fault tolerance and performance of the hardware platform.
ALROSA set an ambitious task to complete the project and bring in a new infrastructure in the shortest possible time, just two or three weeks before the start of the new year of 2013.
The equipment previously used by ALROSA to automate business processes turned thoroughly outdated by August 2012 not only morally, but also physically.
The problem was tackled by experts from CROC, which was chosen as system integrator for this infrastructural project. While developing the plan its engineers considered various options to accomplish the task, including the renewal or replacement of individual components in the hardware platform. As a result, CROC and ALROSA experts decided to deploy an optimized hardware/software suite, Oracle Exadata.
This suite has a number of advantages over other systems being an integrated solution for working with Oracle databases, which contains computing components, a data storage system and high-speed network connecting them within the same integrated environment, as well as specialized software permitting to accelerate the system many times and thereby use it effectively.
Among other things, the apparent advantage of this solution was the absence of the need for additional fine-tuning and organization of data storage systems during the platform integration, while installation works were limited to the mounting of two racks and their connection to the local network of ALROSA. And finally, the IT engineers managed to significantly reduce the cost of using the software and hardware solutions, because the system can use less processor cores with significant growth in performance. As is known, the cost of software licenses is directly determined by the number of cores used.
Among the problems solved by the CROC specialists within this project two should be mentioned separately.
First of all, it is the transfer of the database from the HP platform to the Oracle hardware platform. Such problems often create serious difficulties, especially when replacing one hardware platform by another. Having accumulated the available experience, the CROC engineers devised a plan which allowed a successful migration of data and thus reduce the time of scheduled outage to six hours.
The second task was to increase the system’s reliability. To solve it, the CROC engineers mounted two sets of Oracle Exadata at geographically spaced-apart sites. One of them is servicing transactions, while the other is used for the needs of the analytical system. If one of them fails, its functions will be taken up by the other. This architecture allows the customer to ensure business continuity and reduce the influence of external factors.
In conclusion, it should be said that the established system is easy to upgrade and expand. It allows you to increase the capacity by incorporating the existing idle resources and adding new modules, and it is most important that it is possible to do so avoiding downtime. Besides, it increases the efficiency of financial investments. As a matter of fact, purchasing a system with a configuration "for growth," where much of the capacity is not engaged, is not a good investment, to say the least.
After the project was completed and the company was transferred to the new software/ hardware suit the Oracle database performance for SAP applications increased several times. This improved the level and quality of business process automation for ALROSA in a great way permitting to increase the number of concurrent users to about 3,500 persons, for which previously the system simply had not enough capacity.
Oleg Sayenko, Deputy Head of Corporate Information Technologies of ALROSA, commented on the results of this project: "Due to the coordinated efforts of specialists from ALROSA and CROC the system was put into operation in time. A comprehensive approach to creating data migration scenarios and the high professional level of the CROC experts permitted to work almost unobserved by the user. Data migration and transition to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3-2 equipment took a record-breakingly short time.
We did not even expect such a boost in performance. To be honest, there were some doubts until the last moment, but the early days of commercial operation have dispelled them, so we think about the expansion of the system and moving other SAP tasks to Oracle Exadata.”
