Mercury Technology is a leading provider of Oracle Enterprise Cloud Services and supports clients globally. Clients depend on Mercury Technology’s Enterprise Cloud for their Oracle infrastructure while increasing productivity and boosting their bottom line. Mercury Technology fulfills this mission through the combination of deep Oracle expertise, best practice, and a cloud-based infrastructure. Mercury maintains data center operations in California and Virginia.

Amongst Mercury Technology’s clients are large public companies with global operations and public sector agencies with stringent requirements for performance and reliability. "We do the easy stuff but we also specialize in the hard stuff: very large systems with massive processing requirements and global footprints, such as global supply chains. When we save seconds from millions of transactions, we drive the bottom line to dramatically better financial performance for our clients," said Brian Day, Vice President of Sales at Mercury Technology.

Even the fastest processors and most skillful database tuning are often insufficient to optimize Oracle performance when the problem is latency in accessing data residing on hard disk drives. Mercury Technology needed to eliminate these costly storage delays for its customers, so they needed to find an alternative to hard disk drive-based storage. Reliability, availability, and security are at the core of Mercury Technology’s offerings, so the solution and vendor they selected would need to earn their complete trust in addition to delivering top performance.

Mercury Technology also runs a Green IT operation. So their ideal solution would also be cost-effective and save on power and data center footprint.

The first opportunity to deploy a new top-tier solution that would meet all of the company’s requirements for performance, reliability, efficiency and manageability came when a potential client presented precisely those requirements. This semi-conductor manufacturing client runs a global supply chain system across three continents and wanted universal three-second response time for all users, regardless of location. This is a multi-billion dollar operation that could not afford delay or downtime, so the installation would have to be “bullet-proof” yet be price-competitive in order for the potential client to switch from its incumbent provider.

Mercury Technology realized that they needed to bring in Solid State Disk (SSD) to eliminate storage latency and achieve the necessary performance in order to win the business and launch a premium enterprise cloud offering for Oracle EBusiness Suite (EBS) Applications. Texas Memory Systems immediately stood out as the most trusted vendor in delivering high-performance Solid State Disk. The company has a 30+ year record of performance leadership and innovation and is the vendor of choice for all of the world’s largest SSD installations.

"Texas Memory Systems is the only company that has such a long history in this technology. The other vendors are newer players, none of whom have been working in the Oracle world. A lot of companies are venture-financed start-ups that may be here today and gone tomorrow since their investors will want their money back in two to three years. We wanted the stability of Texas Memory Systems and had spoken with them over the last ten years," according to Mr. Day.

After meeting with the Mercury Technology technical staff and assessing their needs, Texas Memory Systems recommended their RamSan-20 and RamSan-10 PCIe Fault Tolerant Flash products. These cards are easily inserted into a server’s PCIe slot to deliver 450 gigabytes (GB) and 225 GB of storage capacity respectively. They deliver up to 120,000 sustained I/Os per second (IOPS) with a mere 50 microsecond latency. This industry-leading latency is key to the RamSan^® product’s ability to accelerate transactions and improve user response time. The RamSan-20 and RamSan-10 both utilize NAND SLC Flash, the highest performing and most reliable Flash available today. Advanced Error Correction Coding, wear-leveling algorithms, RAID, extended power, excess chip provisioning, and an embedded PowerPC all ensure extreme reliability and a 12 year life for the RamSan^® products. Power consumption is a mere 15 watts.

The RamSan-20 and RamSan-10 enable Mercury Technology to offer dedicated storage for each customer without adding to their data center footprint. The company purchased the RamSan^® products through San Jose-based solution provider, MCE. The systems were dispatched via overnight delivery. According to Marc Schissler, Business Development Manager at Mercury Technology, "The Infrastructure Group was so excited that they installed them straight away and were up and running within the hour." Installation and configuration was straightforward and the performance improvement was immediate

With the RamSan^® PCIe card family, Mercury Technology offers clients the fastest possible storage to meet even their most stringent needs. The company now offers a full selection of tiered services to meet all needs, with the top tier incorporating RamSan^® SSD for optimal performance. RamSan^® was an integral part of the high performance solution that helped Mercury win the supply chain system business of the large global semiconductor client and easily meet their three-second global response time goal. In fact, the significantly faster processing times being achieved using RamSan^® have resulted in that client’s decision to switch to Mercury Technology for additional Application needs. Batch jobs that previously took five hours to process now finish in under an hour. "We see the RamSan^® as a secret weapon, although I guess once this case study comes out, it’s not much of a secret," quipped Brian Day.

The RamSan^® is proving itself a strong Green choice as well. It sits in the server, so requires no additional data center space or cooling and uses just 15 watts of power. This brings significant savings in power as well as the infrastructure required to deliver power and cooling over a 12 year lifetime. "We have a strong Green IT initiative into which the RamSan^® fits," said Marc Schissler. “Not only do we get better performance but it reduces our need for power, gives us a smaller carbon footprint, and reduces our costs. It’s a win-win-win for our clients, our company, and the environment.

By offering RamSan^® Solid State Disk as part of its advanced Cloud services for Oracle, Mercury Technology is clearly demonstrating its ability to add advanced technology where needed, deliver high performance, and retain its leadership edge in helping clients use the best possible technology for their needs. When asked what advice Mercury Technology would offer to anyone considering a RamSan^® Solid State Disk deployment, Mr. Schissler suggested: "We see SSD as an exciting technology and a becoming more prevalent across all customer systems in the future as costs are reduced."