INTRODUCTION
Uitgeverij Averbode has been the undisputed market leader for educational magazines in Belgium for decades, both in Dutch and French for children between the age of 2 and 15 years. Besides magazines, they publish textbooks for pupils and teachers in primary and secondary education, as well as for adult education. In addition, the Averbode Group acts as a distributor for well-known international educational publishers, employing around 100 people.
CHALLENGE
Uitgeverij Averbode’s IT environment is centrally managed from the group’s headquarters and supported by an IT team of 4 employees. As with most publishing houses, Groep Uitgeverij Averbode’s IT team supports a mixed environment: Mac for graphical design and media-related activities, Windows for administration and other departments.
Their IT set-up is based on redundancy, guaranteed by a double data center lay-out. The primary data center is operational, the secondary one acts as disaster recovery location. At these two data centers, they have 4 physical machines, running virtual servers on VMware, combined with NetApp storage.
Besides, each data center houses an extra server running Oracle Virtual Machine (VM), as host of Oracle Database (DB) and Oracle Internet Application Server (IAS).
APPROACH
Monin performed a hardware update, installing new disks and rolling out new backup procedures. Together, we set up a large testing database from scratch, including Oracle VM. This way, we could implement the testing environment on the secondary server, at the disaster recovery site. After successful testing, the production migration was performed. The whole process resulted in limited downtime, a huge benefit for Averbode.
Besides using VMware for the virtualization of their server environment, they also went virtual with Oracle DB and Oracle IAS. Since dealing with Oracle licenses in a non-Oracle virtual environment is very complex and not entirely free, the Averbode Group has decided to keep its Oracle virtualized DB and IAS environment in the Oracle family.
“We didn’t need to reinstall Oracle DB or Oracle IAS. Monin copied them to the new environment, allowing us to avoid a traditional migration path that would require at least ten days to complete”.- Johnny Siongers, ICT Manager at Groep Uitgeverij Averbode.
RESULT
For Groep Uitgeverij Averbode, choosing Oracle VM resulted in a lower total cost of ownership. Fewer hardware will reduce purchasing costs, energy consumption and maintenance. Licence costs remain under control as they manage the rest of their IT environment on VMware.
Oracle VM offers a future-proof solution which enables Uitgeverij Averbode to reduce their traditional lead time to a few days, with minimal downtime. Monin provides comprehensive managed database life cycle services, including implementation, migration, database monitoring, maintenance and support. Thanks to virtualization, Averbode benefits from an IT environment with lower TCO and more flexibility.
“With Oracle VM next to our VMware environment, we fully enjoy the benefits of virtualizing Oracle DB and Oracle IAS, while reducing the number of licenses.” – Johnny Siongers
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