Authors: Mr. Filippo Cecchi CIO and Mr. Mauro Spallina, IT Manager Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure Services, Unicoop Firenze
Partners: Mr. Marco Bettini, CEO & BLM Cloud & On-Premise Services & Distributed Architecture & New technologies, Bridge Consulting, and Mr. Antonio Paterno, Solution Architect, Cloud & On-Premise Services, Bridge Consulting
Unicoop Firenze was founded in Florence, Italy in 1891 and operates as a cooperative supermarket serving 1.1 million consumers today. The company supplies frozen food, fresh fruits, vegetables, beverages, baked products, dairy, beauty, and other products in Italy. With approximately 150 retail stores, 15 warehouses, and 8,000+ employees, Unicoop Firenze manages and monitors infrastructure and data centers across Italy.
Bridge Consulting is a Kirey Group company headquartered in Florence, Italy, and has been a consulting and implementation partner to Unicoop Firenze since 2001. As a leader in specialized IT services across multiple industries and an Oracle partner, Bridge Consulting developed a custom on-premises to Cloud solution for Unicoop Firenze to monitor data and infrastructure. Bridge Consulting has been instrumental in migrating Unicoop from IBM to Oracle in 2007. Then in 2010, Unicoop purchased and was one of the first companies in Italy to run an Exadata engineered system. Bridge has been helping Unicoop grow and evolve their Oracle solution and is key to ensuring Unicoop provides the right services for its core business applications: merchandising, warehouse, point of sale, store inventory management, management control, and finance.
Today, Unicoop Firenze’s on-premises Exadata infrastructure is extended by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Unicoop’s monitoring solution includes Oracle Enterprise Manager for on-premises and cloud targets, Exadata and ZFS plug-ins, custom metrics, as well as performance and troubleshooting solutions. With OCI, Unicoop is monitoring and logging their cloud Autonomous Database targets, managing announcements and OCI alerts. Unicoop is using OCI Ops Insights for SQL Warehouse, Capacity Planning, and Exadata Insights. This provides governance in terms of the status of the targets and the performance, resource usage, and cost management of Unicoop’s solution.
Business Case: Tuning RB2 application on Exadata
Unicoop Firenze has a complex multi-cloud infrastructure enterprise that guarantees high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery. The combination of Oracle Enterprise Manager, OCI Ops Insights, and native OCI Monitoring, allows Unicoop to achieve the governance of on-premises & cloud targets. Ops Insights supports the day-to-day database and infrastructure administrator activities such as analyzing Exadata, Autonomous databases, and traditional Oracle Database workload analysis on IaaS and PaaS. The solution provides access to SQL Warehouse for historical data and compares SQLs across several databases. In addition, Unicoop utilizes capacity planning to forecast resource demand, identify bottlenecks, and reduce oversized systems.
One of the most important Unicoop’s applications is called RB2 and is used to manage products in their stores. Unicoop DBA’s main task is performance tuning so they can quickly understand where they are having issues. To solve this problem, the workload needs to be analyzed to identify the TOP consumer on Exadata, SQL tuning tasks need to be performed on the workload, and the results need to be validated after a change to the database.
More recently, in 2022, there was an increase in CPU usage on Exadata compute nodes (perhaps correlated to Unicoop’s new point of sales). Below is the trend of growing CPU with resulting alerts sent from Oracle Enterprise Manager.
How was Unicoop able to effectively analyze the root cause of this increase in CPU?
- Determine what application is causing the high CPU usage.
- Go to OCI Ops Insights, Exadata Insights.
- Select Unicoop Exadata.
- Select CPU metric and time period for the last 30 days.
The heat map below highlights every database in red that is related to the application consuming the most CPU.
How does Ops Insights SQL Warehouse help tune the database?
- TAG namespace with “Application Name” and lifecycle were created
- Use the TAG filter to view only SQL related to the group.
- Find the TOP SQL using the Loadmap and decide to improve the tuning strategy.
- Complete the tuning activity and measure the results.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has given us the best solution for cost management, technology compliance, and viability. We are happy with our choice of Oracle and have seen a 400% increase in performance since migrating.” Mr. Filippo Cecchi, CIO, Unicoop Firenze
Bridge Consulting noted that since going live in 2020, every release update of managed cloud services with Autonomous and OAC, has been transparent and built trust with their ease of deploying. Since Bridge migrated Unicoop to the cloud, the improved performance of the new infrastructure has been much faster.
Oracle Enterprise Manager & OCI Observability and Management services gave Unicoop a single pane of glass in this multi-cloud era. Today, we actively see OCI Ops Insights support Unicoop DBAs when tuning, rapidly finding bottlenecks & TOP SQL, and helping forecast resource usage to transform infrastructure for their growing workloads.
What is next for Unicoop Firenze?
Adopting OCI was a cultural shift for Unicoop. The move to the Cloud, while difficult, was needed to adapt their internal processes. Unicoop moved from managing physical hardware to cloud environments. The move to the cloud changed the way Unicoop provisions infrastructure. Today they have more flexibility and scalability. It is with that flexibility and scalability that Unicoop was able to activate its first connection between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure. Unicoop is using Azure for its backup and recovery plan and wants to integrate to Oracle Cloud to manage both Azure and OCI as an integrated infrastructure. Unicoop has become a multi-cloud company and is looking to build upon that for future growth.