Cloud Creek Systems executes a Database Migration Project for Jenny Craig taking them from a 6 node Oracle

RAC to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine

The Client:
Jenny Craig, Inc. (JC) is headquartered in Carlsbad, CA. It is one of the most recognizable consumer brands in the world, and is one of the largest weight management service companies in the world. It operates more than 700 company-owned and franchised centers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Puerto Rico, the UK, France and Guam. The company serves the needs of over 150,000 individuals on a weekly basis. Its Jenny's Cuisine prepared foods, along with DVDs, CDs, journals, and cookbooks, are sold to participants at its centers. The program is also available at home through telephone consultations and home delivery of food and support materials.

The Situation:
The primary systems that supported the 700 centers were a 6 node HP/EMC based system that ran both OLTP and Custom Data Warehousing activities. During the day, orders were placed from the 700 centers into Seibel CRM systems. Nightly, Jenny Craig would run batch processes to update their data warehouse. The DW was used by the Centers for analytics for next day activities. Other processes send food orders to warehouses for delivery.
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When Cloud Creek Systems first met with Jenny Craig IT staff, the meeting had to be moved to a larger room due to the number of IT people required to describe the current state of their Oracle systems. There were experts in their Oracle Database, Clustering, Networks, Storage, multiple operating systems in use, Applications, and Middleware. The Jenny Craig IT operation was VERY complex! Jenny Craig was using some of the right technology from Oracle (RAC) but the underlying infrastructure was chaotic and unstable. During our first meeting, pagers went off multiple times for systems issues. It was stated that if one persons beeper went off its likely the problem was in that persons area of expertise and could be dealt with in a timely manner. But if 2 or more pagers went off simultaneously, it was going to be a long night as the diagnosis of multiple touch points among DB, networks, storage systems, etc had to be debugged to find the root causes of the downtime. Additionally, Jenny Craig required a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution. They asked Cloud Creek to include design, recommend the best platform and deploy the solution, based on what decision was made on their overall IT strategy. Our challenge: assemble THE best performing Oracle on Oracle system possible from production to test to DR.

The Problem:
In early 2011 Jenny Craig knew they required an IT infrastructure to enable much improved accessibility and personalization for on line clients. Jenny Craig needed to improve their brand through better leveraging technology. The new/improved platform chosen needed to be adaptable and enable business (client subscription) growth in the U.S. and Globally. JC knows that enabling multiple channels of consumer interaction will support the core strength of personal one-on-one coaching, planning and motivation for customized weight loss programs. Key Business Intelligence metrics need to be available and current, forming the basis of key decision making and thus quick measurement of their impact. The 6 Node system would crash during the day due to instability of the hardware configuration. The system was an Oracle uncertified installation which caused daily outages. The performance was so poor, the system was unable to run the nightly ETL processes to refresh the data warehouse. Jenny Craig also plans to migrate Australia and UK operations to the new centralized IT infrastructure. The expansion will bring focus to the ecommerce capabilities of the site enabling food ordering and coaching communications online to compete with similar offerings from competitors. There was NO way the existing platform could manage that growth requirement!

The (Negative) Impact on the Business:

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Not only had Jenny Craig customers and franchise owners lost faith that Jenny Craig could support their business and personal needs, the IT staff was constantly under stress and working unpredictable nights and weekends to fight fires caused by system and integration failures. This caused high turnover and low morale which affected the knowledge base of complex custom made systems and made debugging that much more difficult. Jenny Craig was at serious risk of substantial customer losses. The resulting system was unstable and unable to deliver performance to meet analytics SLAs for customers. Jenny Craig IT was continually in a defensive posture analyzing and debugging system failures. New business offerings and improvements (Jenny Crag at Home; Portal; Siebel Loyalty and Marketing; Oracle Incentive Compensation; Call Centre) were put on hold until IT could stabilize infrastructure. This caused Jenny Craig to fall behind their competitors for business process and online offerings. Customer satisfaction and trust suffered. Consumers lost faith in JCs ability to deliver the systems they required.

The Incumbent Systems:

Over time, Jenny Craig had built up a custom system of HP Intel servers, EMC and Fusion I/O storage, Infiniband networks and a 6 node Oracle RAC. Competition was fierce from incumbents HP and EMC. HP introduced Flash caching technology from Fusion I/O for benchmarks to compete with Exadata. HP used its political influence with the JC CIO to maintain its insider position. Jenny Craig and (parent company) Nestle have a long standing relationship with HP as a customer for all hardware needs. The choice boiled down to an Exadata, Oracle on Oracle solution, or extending their architecture with incumbent HP, on a commodity server basis, and other data storage providers. This was a highly competitive situation given the established relationship that Jenny Craig and Nestle have with HP. Their CIO could have easily moved forward with an extension of existing HP footprint across the enterprise. Jenny Craig has enterprise agreements with HP and Microsoft as a consequence of both having deep partnerships with their parent company Nestle. IBM and Netezza were also competing extremely aggressively for this business. Netezza especially, reportedly offered extended drop a box in trial and extremely deep discounting for what would have been a huge win for them. Our Oracle ZFS proposal faced an extremely competitive bid against the incumbent and corporate standard EMC. An Oracle ZFS purchase would break the EMC stranglehold on storage for Jenny Craig. Like HP, EMC fought at an executive level to keep Oracle from completing the full Red Stack roll-out with Exadata/ZFS. After the Exadata win, EMC very aggressively tried to compartmentalize Oracle to DB and
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custom servers. By winning with ZFS, Cloud Creek drove Oracle into a full solution provider status at Jenny Craig!

The CCS Solution:

Cloud Creek Systems was convinced that RAC, Partitioning and the Oracle DB were the right tools to use, but that the underlying infrastructure for RAC needed to be totally re-architected and upgraded. This migration and redesign had to be done in a way that minimized system downtime during cutover. Cloud Creek worked with Jenny Craig to research and test environments for RAC before recommending an Engineered Systems approach to RAC deployment and management.

The Oracle ZFS Storage unit was first designed to handle only Exadata/Oracle backup and DR. Cloud Creek recommended that Jenny Craig expand the ZFS storage footprint to include general purpose IT storage further encroaching on EMCs corporate standard offering. On Cloud Creeks recommendation, in August of 2011, Jenny Craig invested in an Exadata platform new and upgraded Oracle Software, coupled by the Cloud Creek Professional Services needed to; 1. Deliver operational stability and improved performance of existing IT infrastructure and systems. 2. Deploy a new stable and superior performance platform to enable new business systems necessary for JC business growth. Jenny Craig purchased 3 Exadata machines from Cloud Creek (2 Half Racks, 1 Quarter Rack). Jenny Craig purchased the following Oracle Software from Cloud Creek: DBEE RAC Partitioning Active Data Guard Diagnostics Pack Tuning Pack Change Management Pack Configuration Management Pack Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack Application Management Suite for Siebel Real Application Testing Test Manager Functional testing Functional testing Accelerator for Siebel
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Load Testing Controller Load Testing Load Testing Accelerator for Siebel

For the follow-on Disaster Recovery system; In December of 2011, Cloud Creek guided Jenny Craig to purchase an Oracle ZFS appliance to provide universal storage and full integration with both Exadata (using Hybrid Columnar Compression) and generic backup and storage for Jenny Craig IT. Jenny Craig deployed a second ZFS to support the test/dev. training environment separate from production. Jenny Craig plans to purchase additional ZFS appliances for their east coast data center in FY13. Currently both EMC and ZFS are equal corporate standard choices for storage solutions, still a competitive challenge, but made much easier thanks to the Oracle on Oracle adoption! In addition, Jenny Craig has purchased Oracle Enterprise Linux and OVM for Test, Dev and Staging commodity Intel environments and will be replacing Red Hat on Intel Servers as corporate standard. Jenny Craig has committed to the full Red Stack Oracle on Oracle. Exadata, Oracle Enterprise Linux and OVM for commodity Intel servers and ZFS for DR. This replaces HP servers, EMC storage, Red Hat and Windows OS, Fusion IO flash drives, custom Infiniband networks and piece meal management tools.

The Results:
1. System Throughput Performance: Critical process throughput improved 90%+ Process A: Previous time 7.5 hours; Exadata 8 minutes Process B: Previous time 7.5 hours;; Exadata 8 minutes Process C: Previous time 7.5 hours; Exadata 8 minutes Process D: Previous time 2.5 hours; Exadata 8 minutes Process E: Previous time 24+ hours (would not finish); Exadata 15 minutes o Note: Process E was designed to load critical metrics into Data Warehouse, due to it failure to run in 24 hours previous day data was not available for business analytics. Huge issue with understanding business metrics daily.

2. RAC Stability / Manageability JC is using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C Cloud Control to fully manage the Exadata RAC environment as a Grid. Reach target of 99.999% uptime
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By leveraging Oracle Enterprise Manager to view, measure and control the unified environment, JC has simplified the previous challenge of diagnosing issues that occur in a manually integrated environment (HP, EMC, Linux, Windows).

3. Exploiting / Optimizing 11G & RAC: By moving RAC to Exadata, JC eliminated the risk involved by using disparate parts for the underpinnings of RAC. While RAC was functioning well, the underlying complex environment (HP, EMC, Infiniband, Windows, etc.) was prone to failure NOT so on Exadata! CCS successfully migrated Oracle High Availability environment to a systems specifically engineered to support HA thus fully exploiting the value of Oracles Database & Clustering solution. Cloud Creek moved JC from 10g to 11g to facilitate move to Exadata 4. Integrated Database Back & Disaster Recovery: Meet SLA for DR for core systems 60 minutes or less for all major applications. CCS proved this could be dine in 30 minutes. Jenny Craig has a fully integrated Oracle on Oracle environment that extends from Engineered Systems, to OEL/OVM Intel servers; to oracle DB, RAC, Partitioning; to ZFS for universal storage. A reliable DR system those JC customers can trust, supporting their 24x7 interactions with 99.999% uptime. Franchise owners trust that their business wont hang while clients are in the office or communicating on-line with coaches. Jenny Craig was able to extend engineered systems seamlessly to DR storage due to the ZFS providing key elements (Hybrid Columnar Compression) that kept data compressed rather than having to hydrate the date and manually integrate EMC into the DR which would create risk and extra manual labor.

Why Cloud Creek Systems:

Cloud Creek works EXCLUSIVELY with Oracle products in software; Database 11g, Real Application Clusters, Partitioning, and Enterprise Manager. In January of 2011 CCS invested in its first Exadata platform, building out our own Exadata Center Of Excellence. In October of that year, we were the FIRST North American Partner to install an Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) after being the FIRST VAR to sell one (to CallSource Inc.) on the planet! Cloud Creek is proving that Oracle on Oracle is real, and delivers results heterogeneous, complex multivendor technology alternatives cant!
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Over our 16 year history we have earned a reputation as leaders in understanding Oracles software products, building a service portfolio and expertise that combine to offer a strong TOTAL solution to a customers needs. With over 200+ Oracle Real Application Clustering technology successes, Jenny Craig knew they had experts from CCS they could trust! Cloud Creek entered this volatile and competitively hostile situation with an Oracle Engineered Systems Strategy, anchored by Exadata, but built on our Oracles Grid and Clustering computing infrastructure expertise, demonstrating that if deployed correctly will continually analyzes demand for resources and adjusts supply accordingly. Once we had that established, we simply needed to prove that the Exadata platform would optimize those assets thus proving the Oracle on Oracle advantage! Jenny Craig staffers were extremely skeptical of a (NEW) Oracle hardware box. But through an extensive discovery process; agile and timely benchmarking, Cloud Creek won/protected the account for Oracle. Cloud Creek transformed the JC IT teams view of Exadata from a box to a fully engineered system with key design wins for creating extreme performance gains. They understand the why and how of the integrated system value. Cloud Creek was selected to partner with Jenny Craig on this extremely strategic initiative thanks to our Engineered Systems expertise, Exadata experience, including running (compelling!) real world benchmarks with actual Jenny Craig data on our own Exadata unit. That benchmark was turned around in 1 week with stunning results. Additionally, CCS has deployed Oracle RAC for 200+ clients and brings best practice methodology experience to design, implementation and to teaching Jenny Craig about RAC systems management. Cloud Creek has developed best practice benchmarking, sizing and deployment methodology for RAC and Engineered Systems for many other clients. The CCS best practices have been used repeatedly for RAC, Exadata and ODA clients.

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