Farmers Insurance utilizes ANR’s Consultants to Help with Data Center Migration and Roll out of Mission Critical Application

Client Information and Requirements:

Farmers Insurance is an insurance giant, with a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America and Europe as well as in Asia Pacific, Latin America and other markets.
Farmers Insurance was moving their entire data center to Oklahoma City which involved a few critical applications running on Oracle Real Applications (RAC). Following the data center move, they planned to roll out a Billion Dollar mission critical application running on Oracle database.

ANR’s Solution and Services:

ANR’s team of highly experienced DBAs provided support and guidance and helped move numerous Oracle RAC systems to the new data center. Our team upgraded several databases from 10.2.0.4 to 11.2.0.3 version. We advised client on following Best Practices for architecting Oracle RAC system including layout of SAN storage for ASM configuration, network configuration for Private Interconnect, SCAN Listeners, and Public and Virtual IP setup.
We provided health check on existing RAC setup to identify areas for improving performance. We used various performance tuning tools and techniques such as reviewing AWR reports, SQL Trace, Explain Plan, SQL Tuning advisors to identify performance bottlenecks.
Based on our prior experience, ANR’s consultants were able to recommend partitioning some of the large tables based on assessment results to improve performance. In a few cases, table compression was recommended which is part of Oracle’s Advanced Compression option.
Our role to develop a project plan and execute it was a huge success, all while keeping down time to a minimum and ensuring zero data loss to the customer. ANR’s team worked on various systems, including most complicated RAC systems with numerous databases with size ranging from 2 TB to 8 TB.
Our team helped setup GoldenGate and Active Data Guard features to replicate data and create a reporting data warehouse. We carefully documented all the tasks for easy knowledge transfer to client’s employees.

ANR’s Achievements:

• ANR’s team was able to manage various complicated tasks in a timely manner.
• ANR DBAs contract were extended multiple times based on their excellent performance.
• ANR helped with performance tuning and created a stable oracle environment after data center migration.
• We assisted with the mission critical application’s roll out and helped improve performance by following Oracle’s Best Practices and extensive experience with other similar application roll outs.

Read what the Senior Manager of CSC has to say about our work at Farmers Insurance.