ACADEMIA

Overstock.com, the popular online discount retailer, is standardizing on Oracle technology to serve as the foundation of its data management infrastructure, Oracle announced today. With its growing business and customer base, Overstock.com is extending its relationship with Oracle so that its millions of customers will have access to its Web sites. Following extensive reviews and tests of database software from Oracle and others, Overstock.com decided to expand its relationship with Oracle based on product performance, reliability and scalability. Overstock.com relies on Oracle's database clustering technology on Red Hat Linux to manage the high volume of daily visitors and transactions. Currently, the company operates five Oracle clusters to power its Web sites. "A few quarters ago, we turned to Oracle to help us address critical data management challenges," said Shawn Schwegman, vice president, Technology, Overstock.com. "Overstock.com has overcome those challenges with the help of Oracle technology -- which has delivered remarkably scaleable computing power. We're now working with Oracle to deploy an enterprise grid that will enable us to align our IT systems to address our most significant business priorities." Enterprise grid to enable Overstock.com to maximize IT utilization Key to Overstock.com's long-term success is ensuring that its IT infrastructure is flexible and capable of incrementally expanding its capacity to meet consumer demand as needed. In order to deliver higher service levels and achieve greater IT system utilization, Overstock.com will transition to an enterprise grid computing model comprising low-cost, standardized servers, a SAN (storage area network) and Oracle® Database 10g. Overstock.com will consolidate its Oracle-based clusters into a grid, enabling it to better reallocate IT resources for high volume on-line transaction processing, query intensive data warehousing applications or however else needed. This fall Overstock.com plans to kick off its initial Oracle 10g project in the form of a data warehouse using Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters. Completion of the first phase of the multi-terabyte data warehouse, to be used for marketing, sales and financial analyses, is expected by year's end. "In addition to standardizing on Oracle for our production OLTP database, we have chosen Oracle as the foundation for our data warehouse over all other solutions we have evaluated due to manageability, scalability, and performance," said Schwegman.