Rodrigo Benzaquen VIR TUALIZATION ARCHITEC T OF THE YEAR Architect uses cloud solution to keep pace with tremendous growth. 2010
MercadoLibre, a fast-growing Buenos Aires, Argentina–based
e-commerce company, didn’t exactly decide to move its infrastructure
to a virtualized environment. It made that move because it had to.
“We were running out of space, out of power, and out of cooling
in our datacenter,” says Rodrigo Benzaquen, site operations and
infrastructure director at MercadoLibre and Oracle Magazine’s
Virtualization Architect of the Year. “So we decided we had to do
something different.”
MercadoLibre is the largest online trading platform in Latin America,
with operations in 13 countries. With its recent quarterly payment
transactions increasing more than 90 percent year-over-year, keeping
up with growth required a change. That’s why in 2009 MercadoLibre
implemented a private cloud environment based on Oracle and NetApp
solutions, including Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux support.
The virtualized infrastructure gave MercadoLibre room to grow, and
it had a significant positive impact on the company’s environmental
footprint—reducing power, space, and cooling requirements by 75
percent. It also saved on disk storage. “We realized a reduction of
50-to- 1 on storage space when we implemented Oracle VM,” says
Benzaquen. ”It gave us a very significant storage reduction.”
WINNER S TATS
Name: Jim Duffy
Job title: Senior data warehouse architect
Company: BNP Paribas
Location: Paris, France
Award: Data Warehouse Architect of
the Year 2010
WINNER STATS
Name: Rodrigo Benzaquen
Job title: Site operations and
infrastructure director
Company: MercadoLibre
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Award: Virtualization Architect of
the Year 2010
GABRIEL PIKO
Jim Duffy DATA WAREHOUSE ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR Architect focuses on developing and evolving applications. 2010
It takes a little something extra to manage a data warehouse that has
half a trillion rows of data. That’s why Jim Duffy, senior data warehouse
architect for BNP Paribas—a European leader in global banking and
financial services, with offices in 84 countries—recently migrated his
data warehouse from a clustered environment to two Oracle Exadata
Database Machines.
“We’re seeing enormous performance gains with Oracle Exadata,
easily 17 times on average, with certain requests being hundreds of
times faster—from minutes to subseconds—compared to our old
cluster,” says Duffy, Oracle Magazine’s Data Warehouse Architect of
the Year. “And that’s without changing anything. The architecture of
the Oracle Exadata system just runs our code better, and now we can
spend more time putting richer analytics and presentation layers on
top of near-real-time datasources.”
Duffy continues, “One of the clearest benefits that I see from the
Oracle Exadata platform is that it gives us the ability to spend much
more of our time developing and evolving our applications rather
than tuning database volumes or concerning ourselves with system-
level details,” he says. “The Oracle Exadata platform handles the bulk
of that for us.”
