One of India's top 10 banks uses Tessell as a unified control plane to manage databases across multiple clouds and on-premises.
Overview
One of India's fastest-growing private sector banks with an expanding presence across the country. For the Bank to manage 100s of mission-critical databases (Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL) across clouds and on-premises had become increasingly challenging where database management, performance and compliance are top of mind.
The Challenge
One of India's top 10 banks wanted to move to a cloud-based managed service model for their databases but have been limited by the offerings currently available on the market that do not support their key requirements:
1. No Managed Service for Oracle On The Cloud (Azure)
Since the bank couldn’t leverage managed services for Oracle on Azure, managing their own large database in Azure with sizes running as high as 17 TBs caused indexing challenges which resulted in extremely slow query response times (over an hour) that did not meet the Bank’s SLA requirements.
2. No Unified Control Plane To Manage Databases Across Clouds and On-premises
With databases across AWS and Azure, managing these environments individually has created complexity. Skills across the two clouds are very different and require dedicated resources to manage them.
0. Compliance Requirements
Database Access Management (DAM) and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) agents are needed for compliance with mandates from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and for governance. Services like AWS RDS do not fully complete this requirement resulting in non-compliance.
0. Limitations of Backup Strategies Provided By Cloud Providers
Backups performed by AWS / Azure managed databases are essentially snapshots that are vendor-locked by the cloud service provider and cannot be leveraged for use cases outside the cloud provider’s environment.
Because of these limitations, the majority of the Bank’s databases are self-managed on-premises and the ones being run within a managed environment like AWS RDS are being re-evaluated by the bank to see if they can be moved to an alternative vendor.
The Solution
This top 10 bank decided to evaluate Tessell’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform to make deploying databases on AWS and Azure extremely simple and elegant while supporting all their key requirements. Tessell’s fully-managed database service takes care of their data infrastructure and data management needs:
● Oracle Databases as a Managed Service
Tessell is one of only a handful of vendors that provides fully-managed, high-performance Oracle databases with enterprise-grade data protection, security, and compliance @ your terms. The bank enjoys zero data loss protection and point-in-time recovery with our Availability Machine and support for native backups for longer-term retention, compliance, and to avoid cloud lock-in.
● Query Optimization To Support Fast Query Response Times
The Bank’s MIS team needs to perform nightly manual backups and cloning to create indexes across all backups so that database query response times remain fast. As part of POC, Tessell was not only able to cut query time on the MIS database by 8x compared to Native cloud deployments but also allow the Bank to easily clone and index databases using one click in the UI or on-demand with automation using Tessell’s APIs. Tessell’s Availability Machine enabled cloning of the databases in minutes for the Bank to make data available quickly for a variety of use cases and stakeholders.
● Addressing Compliance Requirements
With Tessell the bank is able to set up HA/DR across regions and clouds to achieve Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for their mission-critical databases. Using Tessell’s API first architecture the bank can create all formats of data including snapshots, backups, sanitized snapshots/backups, and database dumps. Tessell also supports the installation of agents such as DAM and OEM as required by the Bank making sure they can remain compliant.