The University of Santa Catarina had a reduction of 75% in logical I/O consumption and 92% in physical I/O

Challange

The Federal University of Santa Catarina updates their database with Horus Solutions. UFSC is not only important to the development of the region, but it is also a recognized innovation hub and has developed technologies and products of global impact. However, the main systems of the university had been running on the database manager Sybase 12.5.3 for 10 years. In the meantime, Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010 and support for this product was discontinued; functionalities became limited; and the management more exhausting. In order to be covered by support, increase their performance and take advantage of other improvements of the update, UFSC defined the migration to SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise 16.0 SP02 PL03.

Horus Solutions, certified as SAP's PcoE (Partner Center of Expertise), was selected after a bidding process, for meeting all requirements for the implementation and support of the new platform. “Through a bidding process, in which Horus was chosen to carry out the project, we go to great lengths to deliver the project on time and with minimal disruption to the users of the system ”, explains Vinicius Feltrin, commercial and operations director at Horus Solutions.

Solution

The indicators showed, the update represented a reduction of approximately 75% in the consumption of logical I/O and 92% in physical I/O, which translates to an improvement in the response time to the users of the systems. The new database uses a page size 8 times larger, using in-row optimization methods for LOBs (large objects) data. One of the particular challenges of the project was the resizing of the storage pages, from 2KB to 16KB. The project to update the database involved various professionals from both Departments of the Superintendence of Electronic Governance and Information and Communications Technology - SeTIC , in addition to technicians from Horus Solutions.

According to Bruno Amattos, director of the Information Technology and Networks Department - DTR, the database as well as the server platform were outdated, which compromised the performance even more. The new software was installed on a server using virtualization technology, allowing a much simpler way to expand, update, maintain and migrate the solution. On the other hand, for Leonardo Meurer, director of the Department of Information Systems DSI, the process of updating the systems was very arduous, and the success was due to the technical capacity of the UFSC teams and the support of Horus technicians.