The De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde Accelerates to Digital Transformation

Abstract

The De La Salle - College of St. Benilde or “Benilde” as what it is known for, is a private Catholic college renowned for its dynamic and innovative learning community approach in the Malate district of Manila, wanted an IT infrastructure that could support its aggressive population growth plans. NTT DATA Philippines has engaged with Benilde on implementing a medium-term strategy to modernize and future-proof their applications by utilizing a true private database cloud platform (ODA). NTT DATA delivered an integrated service consisting of several hardware and top-level Oracle database system which is expected to save the College 25% in operating costs.

Challenge

Benilde started in 1988 as an autonomous college, with seven (7) course divisions and degree programs. The College has been experiencing an explosive growth in student population over the past few years as it stood 14,000 students on top of 800 faculty members and 400 associates, prior to the technology implementation. The College population has grown faster than expected and the existing IT infrastructure has not been able to keep up. Due to such inevitable growth, the College's Student Information System Database (SISDB) which is their primary system running on Oracle Database 10g (version 10.2.0.1.0), hosted on EMC Stratus server, was an urgent critical concern which needed to be addressed due to system capacity and right sizing issues. Benilde's technology leaders determined that the institution's existing in-house IT infrastructure was insufficient to support their goal for their data migration project. They wanted a solution that would:

• Reduce the time and cost to introduce new products, as well as provide enhancements
• Enable the company to scale student activity rollouts, automate processes, and increase agility
• Provide timely insight to monitor, manage, and expand the business
• Ensure continuous improvement and innovation in technology delivery

Solution

NTT DATA Philippine's Infrastructure solution team (NTT DATA) provided a seamless migration of Benilde's SISDB (Single Instance) database version 10.2.0.1 to SISDB Oracle Real Application Clusters (High-Available/RAC) database version 12.1.0.2 which is hosted on Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) X5-2, the combination provides Benilde unparalleled database availability, performance and scalability on an Engineered Platform. There is a maximum of 64 TB (double mirrored) of storage which could be used, continuous availability and recoverability is offered via Transparent Application Failover (TAF) it boasts the capability to resume processing on another node without interruption in an event of a node failure. Database Software Patching could be done in a rolling fashion which minimizes application downtime. The Capacity On-Demand software licensing allows user to scale from 2 processor cores to 72 without incurring the costs and downtime associated with hardware upgrades.

There is a fully integrated and redundant system of software, servers, storage and networking that delivers high-availability database services for a wide range of OLTP and data warehousing applications.

Our consultants co-managed the IT strategic roadmap with Benilde that will support the College and help drive the intitution's priorities for total cost of ownership.

Results

NTT DATA Philippines successfully completed Benilde's migration and has moved vital student's data of the College which were in the data center, servers to a cloud enabled platform. We deliver 24/7 infrastructure and application monitoring and managed services, including disaster recovery through NTT DATA Philippines' very own service offering called DBA 911.

In addition, the new solution is expected to enable Benilde to:

• Support digital archiving and records management for on-demand delivery and servicing in support of new business
• Ensure high availability, data protection and disaster recovery > Create high-performance, reliable database
• Reduce IT costs, cut time on applying system patches by 20% to 30%
• Benefit from more robust business continuity and application management services