In today’s fast-moving world data is becoming more important with each passing day. Data is becoming more important because companies are trying to connect their customers to the things they want. In the past companies and customers were in a transactional relationship: Company would produce and the customer would buy. This trend is changing and companies provide connected products and services to their customers. And in the center of this new business resides the most valuable asset: data.
In this blog post, I will share my knowledge and experiences and some use cases about how Delphix has helped companies in manipulating their data while cutting costs and providing huge savings.
Avoid major delays in SAP updates
Updating SAP is a rigorous process and it requires quality data to achieve success. In some cases it may take weeks or months to complete an update process in SAP if there are issues or delays in provisioning data.
This was also an issue in one of Delphix’ customers: Before Delphix, it took 45 days provisioning data for SAP updates and testing. When moving data is such scales it is not possible to talk about begine agile and it was same here.
After Delphix, development teams can provision and refresh data in a matter of hours, not weeks, improving IT agility. Developers, testers and other data consumers become more agile by having on-demand data in their finger tips. Data operators such as DBAs and other parties that works on data delivery become more relaxed since providing data to the consumers became agile and automatic.
Accelerate Oracle ERP data operations
Very similar to upgrading SAP, Oracle ERP has its own challenges when it comes to data. Providing high quality data to Oracle ERP is always important but a challenging task in some of our customers.
This behaviour resulted in some of them as refreshing only once or twice a year. With this particular customer, before Delphix there were difficulties in refreshing data and masking sensitive information in new release staging and testing for their Oracle ERP environment.
This resulted in slowness in their ability to keep mission-critical systems up-to-date and performing optimally.
After Delphix, our customer was able to refresh data daily. They have also provided Self Service data access to thgeir development and test teams and as a result were successful increasing frequency and accuracy of Oracle ERP system updates.
Faster provisioning of Dev/Test Data
Having an interconnected complex environment is a burden on everyone: operations teams to keep it alive and healthy, business teams to quickly response market challenges and regulations, development and test teams for delivering quickly…. Imagine a place having 100+ applications, 300+ databases, and their related integration.
In our customer, it would take upto 7 days to provision 1 environment for a single application project, which often caused environment downtime. Having a downtime also meant developers and testers are waiting for the environments and data. The alternative might be asking operations or Test Support teams to work overtime so that the data and environments can be delivered faster. This resulted inefficiencies and misalignment among coding/testing tasks lead to defects creeping consistently into production systems.
After Delphix, it was possible for our customer to transforms their TDM strategy. Now they can provision an their environments and data hours. As a result, minor application releases and upgrades are performed in days instead of weeks.
Storage Savings
Most of our customers saves up to 70% in their storage investments because Delphix provides all of their non-prod data virtually.
I would also like to share details on this aspect. In one of our customers, the challenge before Delphix was to find enough storage so that they can create a clone of Production database for UAT purposes. Because of storage limitations creating or updating UAT environments were always a problem.
With Delphix we were able to provide storage gains instantly. Ingesting a Production database would take some storage consumption on Delphix’ part but Delphix provided benefits as fast. Creating 3 virtual databases for their UAT needs immediately (in just minutes) and freeing up the storage being used by the old UAT databases took less than a day.
That customer right now is using around 400TB of virtual data in their Delphix supported environments.
