Case study

FlashGrid increases database performance by 11x for everyday health plan provider

Challenge

Simplyhealth runs Oracle RAC database clusters to ensure high availability of their claim management system serving millions of customers. Generating certain reports was taking over an hour, resulting in delays with data processing and unproductive wait time for Simplyhealth’s personnel.

The performance bottleneck was in a proprietary system that had a mix of SAS SSDs and hard-drives used as a shared storage for the databases.

The database team approached FlashGrid looking for a solution that could provide the required level of high availability database performance, and avoid increase in the infrastructure costs.

Solution

FlashGrid Storage Fabric software allowed Simplyhealth to migrate their virtualized Oracle RAC clusters to commodity server hardware and leverage full performance of NVMe SSDs with FlashGrid Read-Local™ Technology.

  • Two 2-node Oracle RAC 11.2 clusters (Production and UAT) consolidated on two physical hosts
  • Total database size: 12 TB
  • RHEL 7.2 virtual machines on VMware vSphere 6.0 hypervisor
  • Supermicro x86 servers SYS-2028U-TN24R4T+ with Intel NVMe SSDs

Results

Simplyhealth now has two virtualized highly available database clusters running on two commodity servers. FlashGrid Storage Fabric software unleashes the full power of NVMe SSDs and provides storage throughput exceeding top-tier all-flash arrays. Report generation time is reduced by up to 11x compared to the previous system.

“With our new virtualized RAC running on FlashGrid architecture we do a 125GB full table scan in 6 seconds. That is an 11x improvement over our previous setup.”

Sam Shiel, Oracle DBA, Simplyhealth

FlashGrid increases database performance by 11x for everyday health plan provider

Founded in 1872, Simplyhealth is the leading provider of everyday health cash plans, dental payment and pet health plans, ensuring over 3 million people in the UK have access to the health products, services and support that they need, when they need them.

www.simplyhealth.co.uk

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