With very little tweaking, AFG was obtaining impressive results. “We’ve seen an average 8 times performance improvement at the database level for reads, and an average 20 times improvement for writes,” Lai adds.

Since deploying Oracle Exadata in conjunction with other Oracle technology, AFG’s brokers have reported significant performance improvements at each phase of their online processes, including faster login times (from 12 seconds to 3 seconds), quicker navigation from screen to screen (from 3 seconds to less than 1 second), and faster product qualification. With 800 mortgage products in the system, it used to take more than 30 seconds to determine which products a particular customer could qualify for. Now it takes about 6 seconds.

IMPROVING OPERATIONAL EFFICIENC Y

AFG’s IT staff tallies up additional savings and improvements behind the scenes. For example, Durston says loading data into AFG’s data warehouse from Siebel CRM used to take nine hours, and now it takes just two hours. And while system administrators previously had to look after the operating system, databases, and storage environment separately, now they are all part of one integrated system. Oracle Exadata combines all of these IT assets under a single support contact, leading to easier system management and easier license administration. With prebundled hardware and software, there are no lengthy implementation, configuration, and tuning chores.

“Moving to Oracle Exadata was a no-brainer for us because it is so much easier to maintain the infrastructure,” Durston confirms.

In addition to these administrative improvements, Durston says the Oracle Exadata platform has provided strategic benefits to the business. “It enables us to deliver a market-leading technology solution to our brokers,” he adds.

For example, by improving the performance and availability of AFG’s I T infrastructure, Oracle Exadata makes it easier for AFG to recruit and retain brokers, increasing revenue and driving the business forward. In addition, Oracle Exadata enabled AFG to deliver an interactive sales reporting system to its brokers. Durston believes that this is a first for AFG’s industry. “We made a strategic business decision to deploy Oracle Exadata because it gives us a competitive advantage,” he states.

AFG currently processes more than 500,000 commission calculations every month. Being able to do this reliably and quickly is critical to broker relations. “It used to take 37 hours to process commission payments to brokers, and now it takes less than 9 hours,” says Durston. “We have never missed a commission payment, and Oracle Exadata significantly minimizes the risk of that happening in the future.” 

David Baum ( david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer
based in Santa Barbara, California.

NEXT STEPS

LEARN more about Oracle Exadata oracle.com/us/products/database/database-machine bit.ly/iicsE4

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Storage Indexes
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B Y ARUP NANDA

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine brings database performance to a whole new level, but have you ever wondered what exactly makes it so fast?

Several components of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, such as Oracle Database 11 g Release 2; Oracle Exadata’s Smart Flash Cache, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and SmartScan features; and InfiniBand interconnect, help deliver high performance. One of the key technologies that supports this performance is the storage index, which is not a regular database index. Storage indexes reside in the memory of the storage servers—also called storage cells—and significantly reduce unnecessary I/O by excluding irrelevant database blocks in the storage cells. This article shows you how storage indexes work and how to make sure they are used effectively.

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