1. CASE STUDY
NASA BENEFITS
FROM AGILE DATA
The NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (NEACC) operates and
maintains a broad spectrum of NASA’s Enterprise Applications, with an emphasis on
fully integrating business process expertise with application and technical know-how.
A small team of civil servants and approximately 300 support contractors sustain
operations, implement new applications and capabilities, and provide business readiness
support to the stakeholders and end users. Nine lines of business are served by over
50 applications and a multitude of integration services, all depending on the NEACC to
provide continuous operations that meet or exceed established service level measures.
THE CHALLENGE
Reduced budgets and increased user demands
required innovative thinking with regards to
operational sustainment at the NEACC. Operational
cost reduction and increasing the organization’s
ability to deliver better, cheaper, faster is the main
agency challenge.
In order to meet this challenge, several vendors
were evaluated. The agency was looking to reduce
operational costs associated with the management of
the NEACC application environment. Four operational
issues were identified: migration from Unix to Linux,
the ability to improve database refresh capabilities,
faster database recovery and provisioning features.
The Delphix database virtualization technology was
evaluated, selected and implemented by the team
over a two week period. The Delphix virtual appliance
sits between the Relational Database Management
System (RDBMS) and the storage tier, serving shared
data blocks to all copies and managing the changes
unique to each copy. The Delphix virtual appliance
is responsible for filtering, orchestrating, and storing
blocks as they traverse the network between the
RDBMS and the storage tier. Due to its placement
between the RDBMS and the storage tier, Delphix is
100% transparent to the end-user application.
THE DELPHIX SOLUTION
BACKGROUND
