Chesapeake Energy Deploys Oracle Grid Computing

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Nov. 5 -- Chesapeake Energy Corp., the largest independent and third-largest overall producer of natural gas in the United States, has deployed Oracle grid computing to enable greater performance and scalability of enterprise-wide online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision-support applications.

Chesapeake Energy implemented Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on three-nodes of four-way, dual-core Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers running Linux to power Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management. The company migrated to PeopleSoft Enterprise on Jan. 1 to increase efficiency and operating performance and better serve their growing work force. Using a foundation of Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters, PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management is available to 6,000 Chesapeake Energy employees.

Since January, the company has incorporated various packaged applications -- both new and existing -- into their Oracle grid computing environment. Oracle's Hyperion Data Relationship Management was deployed to manage master data in the Team Table, a tool that leverages maps and spatial data to pinpoint team members based on their location and roles. In total, Oracle grid computing helps deliver enhanced performance, fault tolerance and scalability to five core enterprise applications and a centralized, corporate data warehouse with additional applications scheduled to be deployed on the grid.

Chesapeake Energy employs Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to manage and monitor the performance of its applications and grid environment. To manage its storage environment, the company uses Oracle Automatic Storage Management, a database volume manager and file system optimized for database access and automates and streamlines performance and storage management for related systems. This has enabled the company to consolidate management tools for database storage and reduce the amount of manual intervention related to database storage management.

"Oracle grid computing has enabled enhanced overall application and system availability translating into less downtime for users," said John Marks, database systems supervisor at Chesapeake Energy Corp. "We have the flexibility to conduct hardware maintenance on an individual server as needed without impacting business users and taking a system offline. And we have the option of adding a server to the cluster before scalability becomes a problem."

Grid Computing Supports Reduction in Energy Consumption

By deploying an Oracle grid, Chesapeake Energy has a single environment to support various applications and databases previously running on stand alone servers. As a result, the company has:

* standardized its applications and databases on a common hardware platform.

* reduced the amount of servers used to support these applications.

* reduced hardware- and maintenance-related costs.

* lowered overall energy consumption by servers.

"As a leader in green initiatives, we're constantly seeking ways to be more energy efficient," said Stephen Taylor, IT infrastructure director for Chesapeake Energy Corp. "Oracle grid computing helped us reduce power consumption rates by enabling us to use fewer physical servers in our environment."

For more information on Oracle grid computing, including Oracle Database 11g, go to www.oracle.com/database.

About Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. is the largest independent and third-largest overall producer of natural gas in the United States. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Okla., the company's operations are focused on exploratory and developmental drilling and corporate and property acquisitions in the Mid-Continent, Fort Worth Barnett Shale, Fayetteville Shale, Permian Basin, Delaware Basin, South Texas, Texas Gulf Coast, Ark-La-Tex and Appalachian Basin regions of the United States.

Source: Oracle Corp.

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