Avirat

AviratAvirat, Inc. is the creator of the OurFamilyWizard co-parenting platform. The OurFamilyWizard® co-parenting platform is more than a calendar for divorced parents or just another online custody schedule or visitation calendar; it gives you access to an array of tools that allow you to easily schedule and track parenting time, share important family information and expenses as well as create clear divorce communication.

task at hand

Avirat asked Enterprise Modules to help them setup the new environment for their website using Puppet and the Puppet modules for Oracle. The focus was on the production database environment, which hosts two databases instances: the main database instance for production hosting, and an instance that supports backup and recovery. The underlying storage for the database is on NetApp storage using the NFS protocol. A NetApp technology called Flexclone was going to be used to supply the lower environments with copies of the production data.

Using the startup service

During the first implementation run, we managed to setup the following using our Puppet modules for Oracle databases:

  • Install Oracle database software version 12.1.0.2.0
  • Patch the database software with the latest OJVM Combo PSU including OPatch upgrade and some one-off patches.
  • Install Enterprise Manager Agent version 13.2.0.0.0
  • Enable dNFS for the storage
  • Create the databases
  • Configure Oracle Transparent Data Encryption
  • Configure Oracle Text
  • Create all tablespaces, roles, profiles, views and users

Continuous immprovement

In the next run, the lower environments were addressed. For the lower environments, Avirat needed to be able to read the data from the volume flexclone of the production database. Since this data was encrypted, it meant duplicating and configuring the encryption wallet and running scripts to customize each of the database environments. Of course, in these lower environments, different database settings, users, profiles and roles were needed to meet the security and compliance needs for each environment. As the setup was done in a highly flexible way, where everything was configurable using Hiera data, this was very easy. The only thing that needed to be done was change the configuration data to manage these entities.

Results

Larry Patterson, Avirat’s Chief Technology Officer: “Enterprise Modules is the only company today that has developed smart Puppet modules, enabling companies like Avirat to create and manage Oracle environments. Enterprise Modules proved it could do the job and their modules seamlessly fit in our Puppet provisioning- and management system. Combined with the fast response of their support desk we were able to be up and running and achieve our security goals within days. We now have complete control over our total Oracle infrastructure, without needing in-house Oracle expertise”.