Clustered database on Windows gives Siemens continuous uptime for Oracle’s PeopleSoft HR

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Siemens Shared Services says it has deployed a clustered Oracle database environment that supports services to more than 70,000 Siemens employees across the US.

The organisation provides services to Siemens companies, including payroll, import/export to HR systems, travel management and accounting, managing more than 5 million payments, 1.9 million pay cheques, and 1.7 million travel and expense claims per year, as well as 5,800 quarterly tax returns. Steve Montgomerie, Oracle database administrator at Siemens Shared Services, explains that as the organisation moved from a client-server architecture to web-based deployment of PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management, it needed a foundation capable of supporting an significant increase in transactions, and of providing continuous uptime. Its new system, he says, needed to support 50—100 super users, each performing payroll for up to 10,000 employees or developing large tax reports, while also facilitating a daily stream of 5,000 employees accessing the HR portal. “As we moved towards an employee ‘self-service’ model for HR functions we needed an IT infrastructure that supported an influx of users and information without the risk of downtime,” says Montgomerie. “Oracle Real Application Clusters on Windows provides us with the continuous uptime we need to meet our critical business objectives, while easing the burden of our IT infrastructure to grow and scale with the business.” Montgomerie says the new system was built on Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Partitioning and Oracle Enterprise Manager. That environment, he says, delivers the performance, scalability, reliability, and flexibility required to support its Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management system, running on a two-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers under Microsoft Windows 2003.