< Back to Success Stories

Communications Provider Sees 50% Reduction in Reporting Runtime with Silk on Azure

To make a long story short...

Who are they?

A voice and data network communications provider to businesses in the US.

What did they need?

To move away from Oracle and Exadata licensing commitments and exit the datacenter.

How did Silk help?

Silk offered the performance needed to run their Oracle workloads on the cloud, similarly to how they managed them in the datacenter with simplicity and scalability.

What were the results?

50% reduced runtime of key reports within Azure compared to on-prem Exadata

Reduced costs due to data reduction enterprise data services

And now for the details.

Company Overview

A private company that provides voice and data network communications and managed services to businesses in the United States. It is also one of the largest residential telephone providers in the country with service covering more than 8 million people. 

Business Challenges

 The company had an initiative to move away from Oracle and Exadata licensing commitments and exit multiple datacenters, within 12-18 months. This was due to the fact that its Oracle licensing costs were considered way too high. The company was looking to move its Exadata workloads to Microsoft Azure, yet their large, database-dependent workloads needed faster performance than could be achieved through native cloud without a serious refactor. In order to meet their deadline to be out of the datacenter, the company needed a solution to move the workloads to Azure quickly while getting fast performance. 

Introducing Silk on Azure

 The Microsoft Azure team knew the solution: they brought in Silk. The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform sits between customers’ workloads and the cloud, delivering up to 10x faster performance without changing a thing about the underlying applications or infrastructure.

Silk does this using rich enterprise data services – such as data replication, zero-footprint snapshots, and deduplication and compression. Not only that, but Silk helps improve Oracle licensing efficiency. The platform’s architecture overcomes IaaS performance limitations and throttles, allowing for the use of less VMs with less vCPUs. Additionally, Silk is able to offload certain operations to the data layer, alleviating the requirement for more vCPUs on the database server (and the corresponding license requirements). With its always-on availability and unbreakable data resiliency, Silk is the ideal solution for customers who are looking to move their most mission-critical data to the cloud. 

The Results

With a 50% reduced runtime for reporting within Azure compared to the company’s previous on-premise Exadata infrastructure, Silk’s performance on Azure proved to be much faster for the company’s applications. In addition, Silk’s enterprise data services allowed the company to reduce the number of resources in the cloud being used – in turn, helping to reduce their cloud spend. Not only that, but Silk gave the team the ability to manage its data on the cloud similarly to how they had managed it in their datacenters previously. Silk’s simplicity, scalability, and data reduction capabilities were the largest selling points for adopting Silk on Azure for its modernization of its Exadata workloads. 

Learn More about this Story

Download Now