Pythian helps World Wide Technology perform a massive database upgrade and save $1 million

WWT was running its mission-critical enterprise resource planning application on a four-year-old server. The company’s entire global warehouse operations interacted with this platform, which could not scale easily, provide a cost-effective disaster recovery solution, or deliver high availability. With processing capacity maxed out—and 500,000 to 3,500,000 transactions an hour on the line—WWT had grown to the point where its hardware could not meet business requirements. 

WWT needed to upgrade its database to the latest version of Oracle Database 11g, migrate from a single-instance to a three-node clustered database, move from Solaris 9 to RedHat Linux 5.5, and upgrade from SAN to Oracle Automatic Storage Management. These projects, all very involved on their own, are even more complex when attempted simultaneously—especially when everything had to be completed within a tight 40-hour maintenance window. WWT partnered with Pythian to get the job done. 

Key Outcomes
 
 
Pythian was brought in on short notice to solve difficult challenges and they did a fantastic job. They’ve quickly become my ‘in case of emergency, break glass’ support and my most trusted advisors. I have the confidence that when I call Pythian, they’ll give me an answer that isn’t just plausible, but correct.

– Todd Carlson, Manager, DBA/ERP Teams, WWT