International Pharmaceutical Company Selects GridApp Clarity™ as Their Database Automation Solution

Industry: Pharmaceutical

The vaccines division of a global pharmaceutical company was in need of a database standardization and automation solution, with major concerns surrounding their planned transition to different OSs and storage systems. GridApp Clarity provided full support for their cross-platform environment for today as well as their future requirements.

Overview:

In the midst of a major overhaul of their database infrastructure, the largest company in the world devoted entirely to human vaccines presented GridApp with the three objectives in their search for an automation solution:

  • Centralized management of complex and varied OS/database environments

  • At least a 50% reduction in man-hours required for database patching

  • An automation solution that would support them in their transition of OS and clustering technologies.

GridApp Clarity™ Solution:

The focus of the initial rollout was to reduce complexity surrounding the administration of highly varied environments that included Oracle RAC, Oracle Single Instance on VCS as well as SQL Server (clustered and standalone). Clarity Actions™ were used to automate administrative tasks such as configuring database replication and database cloning/migrations allowing database administrators to focus on the larger standardization project at hand.

The struggle to keep environments at a standardized patch set was overcome using Clarity Patch Compliance. Patch Packages stored in a centralized Clarity repository was the breakthrough technology that ensured success of standardization and compliance initiatives. Clarity's highly sophisticated patch workflows and the ability to insert various steps involved in patch application, as well as define what stage in the patch workflow they occur (for example Pre-Install Shutdown, Pre-Install, Post-Install, Post-Install Startup) exceeded their time-to-patch reduction objectives. "We were able to patch 75 oracle installs in under an hour and a half, remarkable."

Other benefits include:

  • Full audit trail related to an event - Clarity provides all system, database and error logs for every activity performed.

  • Reduced the number of options and limited operational input increasing standardization, compliance, and simplicity.

  • >80% reduction in Oracle RAC deployment time

  • >90% reduction in database patching time