Johannesburg, 10 Sep 2012
Murray & Roberts is a global group of engineering and design, construction and project management companies with a footprint throughout southern Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, Canada and Australia. The group has worked on prestigious projects around the world, including the Burj Al Arab, in Dubai, and the Gautrain, in South Africa, as well as the new Medupi and Kusile power plants. Murray & Roberts Projects uses an Oracle database environment, which is used to store mission-critical data, including designs, drawings, specifications and even contracts for the company's large projects, making maximum uptime a key requirement. In order to keep this database environment optimised, managed and maintained, Murray & Roberts turned to RDB Consulting for proactive monitoring and database support.
"Our in-house resources did not have the skills necessary to support our Oracle database environment, and we have several key systems running on these databases that need to be properly managed and maintained. Obtaining these specialised skills would not have been cost-effective. Having worked with RDB Consulting on an ad-hoc basis for several years with good results, they were the obvious choice to partner with when it came to outsourcing," says Lodewijk Ijlst, Manager: Business Support at Murray & Roberts.
"Our requirements were for constant monitoring, standby personnel for critical events, and the assurance of a proper disaster recovery environment, among others. We also wanted to tap into the expertise and knowledge of the team at RDB Consulting to ensure that our database is tuned and optimised for enhanced business performance. We took the decision to formalise the relationship through the use of their proactive 24/7 monitoring service as well as database maintenance and support," he adds.
RDB Consulting will be providing remote monitoring of the database to ensure issues can be resolved before they affect business performance, as well as regular health checks of the database and the state of backups and disaster recovery. As part of the service, weekly status reports are sent to Murray & Roberts along with any recommendations for action. Statistics around the monitoring service are also delivered on a weekly basis for added insight into the database environment. Six months into the contract, RDB Consulting will also perform a backup and restore test to ensure the solution is usable and that the process will successfully restore the database to its online status, should a disaster occur.
"Murray & Roberts now benefits from professional services at a cost far less than that of hiring full-time database administrators. They will also benefit from 99.9% uptime on the database guaranteed by our service levels. We also offer transparency in the database environment to ensure backups take place and are successful, and ensure database systems remain optimally configured to continue supporting the needs of the business," says Jaroslav Cerny, CEO at RDB Consulting.
"We now have confidence that we will be back up and running within 24 hours, should any serious issues occur on our database, minimising the impact to our business. With the proactive monitoring, we are constantly assured of the health of the database, and that any issues will be identified before they impact our systems. In RDB Consulting, we have a partner with extensive skills, and we will not hesitate to call on them to consult on further issues, should these arise," Ijlst concludes.
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