The Light and Gas Operator extends its on-premises data center and creates a comprehensive testing environment by leveraging Oracle Cloud services and the benefits of on-demand hybrid infrastructure
Enegan was founded in 2010 as a supplier of light and gas. Later, Enegan has extended its offer becoming a TLC operator.
Enegan operates throughout the country and it was a pioneer in green energy to set the goal of zero CO2 emissions for each customer.
The company was founded as a reseller of electricity and gas. Later, it expanded the trader’s business through two subsidiaries: Enegan Power Trading and Enegan Gas Trading. The core values and principles of the company are: the attention towards the customer and the quality of the services offered.
Over the years Enegan has been able to create a new way of conceiving the supply service, investing in innovation, reliability and transparency and it starts to grow progressively, in particular in the three-year period 2016-2018.
This constant business growth has also imposed a progressive transformation of the company’s on-premises technological infrastructure, which today exploit the benefits of the iperconvergent infrastructure Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), specialized for the workload databases. There was also the need of an increasing commitment of resources from the organizational point of view to cover the most strategic processes needs that presented difficulties: among these, the billing system.
We have about 130,000 points and we issue about an even number of invoices every month.
This is a complex "one shot" process because, by definition, billing involves total care and accuracy.
explains Giacomo Morelli, CEO of Enegan.
The single code application system implies, in fact, that the manufacturer develops and maintains a single instance for all its customers. This mechanism provides for continuous developments and updates. In fact, between one invoicing and the other, it can take place dozens of code updates and this obliges to a particular attention.The challenge for Enegan was to govern the billing process fully and safely, in a context where the government was partly held by a third party: the software manufacturer.
Enegan has grown a lot in recent years and our customer database has reached significant dimensions, beyond the three Tera, with tables involved in the billing process that reach even hundreds of millions of records.
This means that even a trivial aspect, such as the inclusion of an index by a producer, makes it difficult for us to understand whether or not all this brings us a benefit.
adds Giacomo Morelli.
Speed and optimization with cloud on-demand
In order to govern and optimize the billing process, Enegan needed a comprehensive test database, with similar characteristics to the production ones. One of the critical issues faced by the company was the need to implement the project quickly, identifying the new infrastructure to be adopted, installing it and making it operational.
Enegan turned to Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group, already partner of the company, which has been supporting the company in its technological choices for the past 3 years, to better evaluate all the needs related to investment, timing and costs that the adoption of a new infrastructure.
Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group suggested to the customer to adopt a new model, extending through Oracle Cloud on-premises services, giving more dynamism to the project.
We already had some cloud services, but nothing so strategic.
That’s why at the beginning we were a bit skeptical about how we could solve investment, security and networking issues.
In addition, given the complexity of the project and the need to quickly clone our database, I was not sure that the cloud was the best choice. But I had to change my mind.
comments Giacomo Morelli.
Since Enegan needed the access to the service only for a limited period of time per month, Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group made a careful assessment by projecting the costs of a possible on-premises and cloud facility over a five-year period of time. So, cloud has been immediately very convenient even as a long-term choice.
As for security, Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group demonstrated that all data in the Oracle cloud, encrypted by definition, was even more secure than in the on-premises infrastructure. The Oracle cloud, second generation, is designed to be by definition an enterprise cloud, designed for production loads, and places virtualization within the firmware of networking to make sure that the possibilities of attack from the outside are virtually nil.
From the point of view of networking, Oracle cloud represented an extension of Enegan’s on-premises, a Virtual Private Cloud Network, with a dedicated and segregated service for Enegan interconnected with a VPN and accessible only through the company’s internal network.
The last critical aspect, related to the time of cloning, was also satisfied by creating on the cloud a copy of the production database, always synchronized through Oracle Data Guard, which is regularly backed up: it represents the starting point to generate on-demand testing environments.
The entire project was carried out by Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group in just three weeks. It was divided into three phases:
- the activation of the cloud
- the networking phase to configure the extension of the Enegan data center to the Oracle data center in Frankfurt and the creation of the Virtual Private Cloud Network
- the activation of the Data Guard through a PaaS service of Oracle.
Finally, Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group has activated the backup with monthly retention. Once all scenarios have been opened, Enegan has easily created on demand testing environments consisting of the database and a virtual machine to test the most critical workloads.
The choice of the cloud was successful, in particular because as the billing period approaches, it allows us to carry out a whole series of tests, to simulate the production process and to intervene where malfunctions and unforeseen events occur, especially in terms of performance.
With the cloud, we have created a dynamic system that allows us to solve many difficulties. Today we are sure that when we launch an invoicing process we will have no surprises, despite our application map is extremely complex.
adds Giacomo Morelli.
The Hybrid Cloud represents the best compromise for the adoption of cloud services, ideal for minimizing investments and having the flexibility to face the changes.
We are very happy to have supported Enegan in fully reaping the benefits of this approach that allows Enegan to have the CPU capacity on demand and makes it possible to size systems appropriately to perform analysis and evaluation fast and fast.
explains Marco Bettini, Managing Partner of Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group.
From billing to disaster recovery - Enegan looks to the future in the cloud
The moment we need to clone our testing environment for our activities, we do it with agility because we have created a system that allows us to shorten the time in a substantial way.
The cloud has allowed us to take an additional copy of our database out of our infrastructure, even with Disaster Recovery capabilities.
adds Giacomo Morelli.
Through Oracle Cloud it is possible to automate the creation of the DevOps environment, Test & Training laboratories and also to realize Disaster & Recovery solutions. One of the difficulties that traditional disaster recovery systems present is having by definition the same size as the primary system.
In this context, the cloud paradigm adapts perfectly to the need, because it allows you to access a complete and constantly updated database on request, using it only when it is necessary or for any testing over the year.
We are very satisfied, so we have recently renewed the service.
We are starting to get familiar with the cloud and our next step, together with Bridge Consulting | Kirey Group and Oracle, will take even more advantage of what we have achieved.
We are convinced, in fact, that we will be able to completely replace our current development environment with a cloud development environment".
concludes Giacomo Morelli.
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