OmniTI

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Many say OmniTI “wrote the book” on open source. However, as an Internet consultancy whose customer list reads like the “Who’s Who” of the Web 2.0 marketplace, OmniTI always recommends the best product for the job, whether it is open source or commercial.

“We solve problems with business software,” says Theo Schlossnagle, principal and founder of OmniTI Computer Consulting. “We try to remain technology agnostic, but open source has matured to such a point that most of the time, it’s difficult to justify an alternative.” About 98 percent of the company’s solutions include open source software, and the OmniTI Labs Web site serves as a free repository for open source tools and projects.

When one of OmniTI's customers faced skyrocketing costs to scale up an Oracle database to meet its growing needs, OmniTI looked at several commercial and open source databases. OmniTI decided to replace the Oracle database with PostgreSQL, because the feature set is comparable to Oracle's and the migration was expected to be smooth.

The original Oracle database was a 1.8 terabyte data warehouse, with between 5,000 and 10,000 PL/SQL functions that routinely initiated complex business intelligence queries against the data set. The data warehouse worked with the customer's half-terabyte Oracle 8i online transaction processing (OLTP) database, which performed up to 10,000 transactions per second. OmniTI decided to migrate the data warehouse to PostgreSQL, which took OmniTI only 3 months, rather than the standard 4-12 months with most data migrations. To keep the project within scope, the OLTP database, with its large amount of customized code, went unchanged.

At first, the new PostgreSQL application ran on 64-bit Linux, but when the customer experienced 20 outages in four months, OmniTI migrated to the Solaris 10 Operating System. The migration took only one day. Although most of the outages were hardware-linked, Solaris 10 — unlike Linux — offers features that quickly identify hardware issues so they can be resolved.

OmniTI also deployed MySQL database to import and export data for the customer’s solution. OmniTI runs hundreds of PostgreSQL and MySQL databases for its clients, so Schlossnagle has a good idea of the strengths of each.“PostgreSQL can handle extremely complicated business intelligence on billion-row data sets, with a feature set that is comparable to Oracle's. In fact, Oracle database administrators can easily apply their knowledge of how databases work to PostgreSQL.” By contrast, he notes, “MySQL works well for large-scale raw data manipulation such as handling the import and export of data and is probably the fastest database on the market.”

With its new solution, OmniTI's customer not only gained a better performing database that is optimized for its system, but also achieved significant savings. By migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL, the customer saved $400,000 in initial licensing costs—and nearly an additional $200,000 annually in maintenance fees.

The solution uses two 4-way dual-core Sun Fire V40z servers with 32GB of RAM running PostgreSQL and takes advantage of Solaris 10 features such as DTrace . Through DTrace the PostgreSQL database solution can be optimized by tracing the path of a query to determine how efficiently resources are being used. “With DTrace, you can debug all the way down to the hardware level, so you can identify issues and fix them quickly,” says Schlossnagle. “It's reduced troubleshooting from days to hours.”

The solution also relies on the ZFS file system in Solaris 10. During a catastrophic accident when 1.8 terabytes of data were lost, Schlossnagle restored the entire database in just seconds using ZFS. “I typed ZFS rollback and one second later I had my database from this morning.” says Schlossnagle. OmniTI also contributes code back to the community. For example, it offers a ZFS-based backup tool on the OmniTI Labs Web site. When developing solutions for its customers in-house, OmniTI also uses Solaris 10 Containers for server virtualization, which helps the company save on its server footprint and costs. One machine at OmniTI powers 40 development environments.

In some parts of its operations, OmniTI uses OpenSolaris as well. "We do a lot of open source development. We have several servers that run OpenSolaris, specifically for the leading edge features. OpenSolaris has proven to be invaluable in keeping our team abreast of new developments before they hit the Solaris label. It gives us the ability to both strategize and prototype systems based on leading edge features," says Schlossnagle.

As for the customer that OmniTI migrated to PostgreSQL, the savings and optimized database performance is once again proving the value of OmniTI's approach, providing evidence that with PostgreSQL, OmniTI did, indeed, recommend the best software for the job.