Virtualisation improves Parks Victoria performance

The Melbourne-based organisation Parks Victoria is the custodian of 3.96 million hectares of parks and reserves - 17% of Victoria’s total land mass - and is also responsible for the recreational management of Port Phillip Bay, Western Port, and the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers.

As an organisation focused on the conservation of natural and heritage assets, Parks Victoria is required by law to operate in an environmentally sound manner. This mandate extends to every part of the organisation and was the impetus behind a decision to implement virtualisation technology from Oracle to complement a 15-year-old Oracle stack that was last upgraded in 2006.

The adoption of Oracle VM enabled Parks Victoria to reduce physical server numbers, lower the amount of electricity needed to power and cool this hardware, and minimise the organisation’s carbon footprint. Coupled with Oracle Automatic Storage Management, virtualisation has also led to improvements in performance and availability, shortened backup windows, and reduced server provisioning times.

“Parks Victoria is a reasonably conservative organisation with limited resources, but virtualisation has enabled us to do some innovative things without incurring huge expenses,” said Chris Perry, Oracle Project Support Manager, Parks Victoria.

“The implementation of the Oracle virtual environment has been very smooth and we haven’t had any major problems with it.

“We were expecting a 20% increase in performance, but we have way exceeded our expectations. Being a longstanding user of Oracle products, taking the further step to integrate the operating system, enterprise applications, databases and automated storage management on the Oracle virtual platform made a lot of sense,” said Perry.

Parks Victoria had six physical servers running Oracle databases, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Spatial. Of these six servers, four were in production and two were used for testing and development. These servers were housed in a server farm in Melbourne.

In 2008, a decision was made to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 as a fresh install and implement Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle’s Hyperion solution. At first estimate, this would have required Parks Victoria to purchase 16 new servers (the existing six machines were to be decommissioned). Not only was this a very expensive option, the hardware and the racks to house the servers would not fit into the server room. The electricity required to power and cool 16 enterprise-class servers would also be significant, increasing the size of the organisation’s carbon footprint.

According to Perry, virtualisation was only one answer to the dilemma. “Parks Victoria is deemed to be a green organisation, and we need to maintain our green credentials,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we have been pushing for virtualisation across our infrastructure for some time. The fact that Oracle has a solution in this space is pretty exciting, as it meant we could standardise on the Oracle platform.”

Benefits include: gained the flexibility to rapidly implement new servers, balance loads across multiple machines and migrate to different virtual instances; provisioned a virtual server in 35 minutes, compared to six to 10 weeks for a physical machine, enabling new business needs to be quickly accommodated; completed maintenance work during working hours with no impact on performance or availability; cut power and cooling requirements, resulting in significant cost savings; fulfilled green mandate by adopting a virtualised infrastructure; and shortened backup times, with one program completed in 25 minutes compared to 1.5 hours in the past.