American Tire Virtualizes Oracle With EMC VNX

EMC Corporation announced that American Tire Distributors, the largest distributor of wheels and tires in the US, has selected EMC VNX unified storage, EMC backup and recovery solutions, and VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies for its 99% virtualized private cloud infrastructure.

On its journey to the private cloud, American Tire has virtualized its mission-critical Oracle eBusiness Suite to increase performance and scale during usage peaks.

Customer Benefits:

• Available and Scalable – American Tire has achieved 100% availability since moving to EMC VNX, while new Oracle applications can now be deployed for growth in just minutes without downtime.
• Efficiency and Cost Savings – By virtualizing its Oracle suite, American Tire is able to allocate only the amount of Oracle licenses and hardware that is needed, reducing the number of physical servers from 79 to just nine, while, avoiding over-paying for Oracle software licenses through more accurate provisioning of CPU resources.
• Backup and Restore – American Tire has achieved 2X faster backups and 9X faster restores of its Oracle Database environment and reduced backup storage using EMC Data Domain.

Moving to the Cloud
With its legacy hardware and applications, American Tire’s IT infrastructure was static, highly inefficient and not meeting the dynamic needs of its organization. In order to gain the agility that its business demanded, reduce costs and increase scalability, American Tire embarked on the creation of a private cloud using EMC VNX unified storage and VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies.

"When we looked to technology vendors with expertise and knowledge to help us plan, build and execute a cloud, EMC and VMware were the clear choice," said Tony Vaden, Vice President and CIO of American Tire Distributors. "We selected EMC VNX unified storage for its simplicity, efficiency and performance. We needed the ability to auto-provision our tier-one storage to critical applications without competing with tier-two applications."

"The EMC VNX storage system has been flawless at this point with 100% availability," said Vaden. "The transactional speeds that we’ve achieved are impressive. We now have more flexibility in our environment with the scalability and tiering that VNX provides."  

As part of the journey to the cloud, American Tire Distributors deployed VMware server virtualization through the help of managed services provider House of Brick Technologies, LLC using VMware vSphere. The result of virtualizing the Oracle servers led to increased scalability and availability of applications through non-disruptive data movement.

"EMC has enabled us to scale our environment, add more power on-demand with no downtime and without any impact to our users," said Angelic Gibson, Director of IT Operations for American Tire Distributors. "We can provide better performance, scalability and availability with no downtime, a major benefit to us. All the while, we’ve managed to remain transparent to the customer, delivering services to them seamlessly. We’ve had great success with EMC and VMware technologies and both companies have been integral along our journey. In addition, through the use of VMware server virtualization we have the ability bring up new application tiers for Oracle eBusiness Suite in less than 20 minutes, without application downtime."

As American Tire continues on their journey to the cloud, it plans to also use VMware software to virtualize its desktops, reducing the burden of managing its 2,500+ PCs and laptops and move the management into the data center to manage it centrally.

Virtualizing Oracle
Through virtualization, American Tire has improved the efficiency and cost savings of its server hardware infrastructure while increasing the cost efficiency of its Oracle software license investment.

"By virtualizing Oracle, we’ve been able to provision only the amount of hardware that we need to run production so we don’t over-allocate," stated Gibson. "Through virtualization, we have reduced the number of physical servers from 79 to just nine."

"If you’re paying Oracle per CPU and you are over provisioning servers for your peaks, you are overpaying. Virtualization allows you to pay for the CPUs you are using to run your Oracle today more accurately, without over provisioning, decreasing the overall license cost to Oracle," stated Gibson.

Transforming Backup and Recovery
American Tire was also looking to transform its tape backup infrastructure to a more efficient model, looking to eliminate tapes while addressing the tremendous data growth it was experiencing. After consideration, American Tire decided to replace its tape infrastructure with EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems. Administrators can backup and restore Oracle databases directly to and from the Data Domain systems using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN).

"Backing up our 2.5TB Oracle production database used to take 12 hours," said Bill Roberts, Senior Enterprise Architect at American Tire Distributors. "Now, with Data Domain, those backups take just five hours. In addition, it used to take us 36 hours to restore our environment where as it now takes us just four. The operational time savings are tremendous as well. It’s allowed our two full-time backup resources to go from spending 100% of their time working on backups to spending just 50%, allowing them to spend time on new projects to advance the business."

American Tire is now able to scale and backup data in a timely manner compared to its previous tape backup solution. It has managed to replace over 200TB of tape infrastructure with 24TB of deduplication storage.

"In moving away from tape, we’ve eliminated the need to purchase and use nearly 2,000 tapes a year by moving to Data Domain," stated Roberts. "We don’t need to worry about mechanical issues like we did with tape either. Our backups are much more reliable now."