York University is a leading teaching and research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The institution has one of the largest and most diverse student bodies in the country, with over 53,000 students from 178 countries and over 300,000 alumni around the world.
Steve Ojwang, Director of Infrastructure and Telecom at York University, discusses the challenges and opportunities of managing the university’s database group. Ojwang, who joined the university in May 2019, explains, “I’ve worked in IT for different industries, such as financial services, automotive, non-profit, start-ups, and now higher education in the public sector. I look at IT from a business perspective and how to solve business problems. For York, that means how to use technology to improve the experience of students, educators, and staff and to support institutional growth."
York has been an Oracle customer for a long time, utilizing Oracle Database to run many enterprise applications. Ojwang adds, "After looking at the systems and infrastructure York had, we noticed there was room for improvement, and we started looking for a way to better leverage new technology available to us.” To solve this issue, York moved to a consumption-based, engineered PaaS solution.
Ojwang explains, “Exadata Cloud@Customer was attractive because it took a lot of licensing restrictions out of the equation, and it gave us the best performance we could get from a hardware standpoint. We could refresh the Oracle Database infrastructure and have a good network, compute, and storage on engineered systems vs. a DIY build of stitching multiple pieces together."
This was aligned with York’s preference to use integrated engineered systems to reduce duplication of work and ensure staff could allocate their time efficiently.
Ojwang’s team focuses on three important factors to provide a good customer experience:
With Exadata Cloud@Customer, York improved the average time to complete many Snapshot and ETL jobs, for example:
Snapshots and ETLs |
Legacy Systems |
Exadata Cloud@Customer |
Finance Snapshots |
31 minutes |
16 minutes |
Finance ETL |
120 minutes |
80 minutes |
HR Snapshots |
81 minutes |
18 minutes |
HR ETL |
48 minutes |
16 minutes |
Advancement Snapshots |
96 minutes |
42 minutes |
Advancement ETL |
243 minutes |
58 minutes |
Ojwang explains, "When the new Exadata Cloud@Customer racks were delivered and ready to replace the legacy infrastructure, York was facing the Covid-19 pandemic. Technology became highly relied on, so we had to quickly adjust from an on-campus to a remote learning environment. We had to look at the platforms and systems in place and understand how to scale and move quickly to meet faculty, staff, and students' needs." Having the flexibility to scale the database platform provided the university with the ability to pivot quickly. "Exadata gave us the tools to grow on demand and we were able to free up time to focus on improving customer experience.”
In addition to better performance, data warehouse reports and queries significantly improved. Steve explains, “For example, one important query used to take 11 seconds, and now only takes 6 seconds. Another query runtime was 11.11 minutes, to now only 1.34 minutes on Exadata Cloud@Customer.”
York University also chose Exadata Cloud@Customer for the ability to take advantage of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on-premises, behind their firewall. “The new features allowed us to have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of servicing the underlying databases with patching and partitioning features,” said Ojwang.
Ojwang added, “My recommendation to any organization is – if you have budget, go for a pre-built engineered system. For Oracle databases Exadata Cloud@Customer is a great option because it moves you up the stack and allows you to focus on what moves your business forward.”
Nancy has worked in the IT industry for more than 20 years and has held positions in TeleSales, Sales, Project Management, Product Management and most recently as Director of Product Marketing, Oracle Exadata Cloud and Engineered Systems.
Steve has 20 years of technology experience, and 10 years of leading technology and operations teams, with a focus on strategy, business transformation, and innovation. His focus is on building strong collaborative relationships between business units and technology divisions.
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