The upgrade to a clustered database environment was part of a larger project to modernize its IT systems that serve Georgian College's seven campuses, approximately 10,000 full-time students, 28,000 part-time students, and 1700 full-time and part-time staff.

Drivers behind Georgian College's upgrade to Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters were:

• To enhance the performance and uptime of its PeopleSoft Enterprise applications (version 9.0) spanning Campus Solutions, Financial Management, Human Capital Management, among others; and,
• Deliver a scalable system to handle spikes in traffic such as during student registration periods as well as accommodate a growing enrollment over the coming years.

The college migrated off of a legacy system that was expensive to maintain from a cost and resources perspective, and that also struggled under the burden of high volume of transactions during previous student registration periods resulting in downtime for student registration and administrative systems.

Since the upgrade, Georgian College's registrar office has experienced increased application performance and availability levels enabling the office to cut the registration window in half from what it was previously.

Overall, the college's testing - which concentrated on how various ancillary and legacy systems would behave in a cluster - revealed few issues and a dramatic boost in performance.

Georgian College's production and test clusters are comprised of four Dell M600s with Dual X5450 4-core Xeon Processors and 64 GB RAM.

"Reliability, performance and scalability were deciding factors behind our decision to move to Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters", stated Terry Speare, Senior DBA, Georgian College. "Now our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications are performing like a top. Our constituents are ecstatic with the application uptime and performance we're experiencing."