Apollo Group Uses Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

Apollo
Group Inc. is leveraging Oracle
Exadata Database Machine and Oracle’s
Sun ZFS Storage Appliance to streamline the technology that supports
student services teams at its higher education subsidiaries.

Apollo Group is one of a large private education providers, offering educational programs and
services at the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels through its
subsidiaries University of Phoenix, Apollo Global, Institute for Professional
Development and College for Financial Planning.

Apollo Group’s use of Oracle Engineered
Systems is part of its larger work to develop new and innovative ways to
deliver training and skills to help close the widening skills gap across the
country. Its company’s spirit of continuous change and innovation helps better
support its students.

To support its subsidiaries’ large and
diverse student populations, Apollo Group needed to ensure its technology
infrastructure, legacy hardware and software all perform efficiently and with
minimal downtime.

Apollo Group determined Oracle Engineered
Systems offered the best solution for its Oracle E-Business Suite deployment,
as the integrated hardware and software solutions could be launched quickly
with minimal impact on the uptime of its platform.

With Oracle Exadata, Apollo Group has sped
up strategic reporting by 5X, enabling business users to access key insights in
about an hour, rather than waiting overnight for reports to generate.

In addition, Apollo Group decided the Sun
ZFS Storage Appliance could provide a high-performance, highly available
and scalable storage environment for Oracle Exadata backup and recovery.

Using the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture best practices for Oracle Exadata
backup and recovery, Apollo Group shrunk its backup window from more than 24
hours to less than 40 minutes for a full backup of a 4TB database. The result:
a reliable online service for students who rely upon the integrated
hardware and software solutions as part of their coursework and progress toward
graduation.

The appliance also enabled
to reduce DR time and helped reduce cloning time by one-third
for its development and test environment.

In addition to overall performance
improvements, Oracle Exadata and the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance also provided savings in data center space, power and cooling.

With a technological foundation for application innovation supported by
Oracle engineered systems, Apollo currently has plans to upgrade its
applications to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

"We’re tackling the tough questions in higher
education, and focusing our time and energy on empowering adults to pursue
lifelong learning in formats that fit their busy lives and match their career
goals," said Michael Sajor, CIO, Apollo Group. "Streamlining our E-Business Suite
infrastructure on Oracle engineered systems enables our student-facing teams to
reduce time spent on tedious-but mission-critical- tasks, so they can focus on
strategic issues that promote our goal of a better educated and prepared
workforce. Apollo Group is focused on functionality, simplicity of use, speed
to market and flexibility-and Oracle’s systems are helping us deliver on how we
interact and serve potential and existing students."