In July 2010 Information Technology saved Pima Community College $150,000 per year by implementing a redesigned Oracle environment. The original architecture consisted of two Sun E20K servers made highly available with Sun Cluster. These servers were replaced with five Sun x4600 servers running Oracle Enterprise Linux and single-instance Oracle databases on Oracle Clusterware. In addition to the server changes, the back-end storage system was replaced with a Hitachi 3080 network attached storage device.

Savings were realized through lower hardware maintenance fees and the use of "FREE" Oracle Clusterware. Additional savings were achieved by moving from a fiber connected SAN to a gigabit Ethernet connected NAS. All of these savings were attained without a loss in performance or reliability. In fact, we have seen an increase in performance and a reduction in administration overhead. We will present the migration path, pros and cons of the new architecture, and the reasons behind our decisions.