MercadoLibre, Inc. Saves with Oracle® VM and Oracle Unbreakable Linux

Oracle Software and Support Reduces Costs, Streamlines Infrastructure for Latin America’s Largest Online Marketplace
Redwood Shores, CA .-MercadoLibre, Inc., Latin America’s largest online marketplace, has implemented Oracle VM server virtualization software, Oracle Management Pack for Linux, and Oracle Clusterware for Oracle Unbreakable Linux to support high volume growth across its e-commerce platform.
MercadoLibre is also transitioning their Linux services to Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
In addition, MercadoLibre is using Oracle VM Templates, which are pre-installed, pre-configured virtual machines of enterprise software, to speed software deployment.
Oracle VM and Oracle Unbreakable Linux enable MercadoLibre to reduce costs, space and energy consumption, and accelerate software deployment, while providing a scalable, reliable IT infrastructure to support its rapidly growing user base.
MercadoLibre uses Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters to power the company’s infrastructure and deliver highly available services that allow users to seamlessly search, interact, buy, sell and pay for products in their online marketplace.
Simplifying Infrastructure, While Accelerating Software Deployment and Lowering Cost
MercadoLibre.com, which has served more than 37.8 million users since the site launched, creates a market for a wide variety of goods and services. The site is among the top 50 in the world in terms of page views and is the leading retail platform in unique visitors in each country in which it operates.
The company’s dynamic growth was beginning to burden its IT infrastructure. To keep up with user demands, MercadoLibre was constantly requiring more hardware, and in turn, additional physical space, cooling systems and power. The company was also challenged with increasing management issues related to server utilization and availability across its data centers.
In searching for a virtualization partner, MercadoLibre, which runs 99 percent of its mission-critical systems on Linux, was concerned with finding a Xen-supported solution that could fit seamlessly within their infrastructure. Oracle VM was best equipped to meet the needs of the fast growing company.
With Oracle VM and related Oracle software, MercadoLibre has been able to consolidate hundreds of physical servers into less than ten core servers -- each running multiple virtual machines.
This consolidation allowed the company to scale server cabinets while improving server utilization, minimizing and centralizing disk space, enhancing the availability of critical equipment, simplifying administration and dramatically reducing space and power usage.
The use of Oracle VM Templates has allowed the company to achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations, through the creation of standard software templates that include Linux and application software that are created once and then replicated across other virtual machines.
As MercadoLibre migrates to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support they experience the benefits of an enterprise-class, lower-cost, simplified support process, with a single point of contact for their entire application solution.
Supporting Quotes
“Our number one goal as a company is to provide a superior quality of service to our users,” said Rodrigo Benzaquen, Director, Site Operations and Infrastructure, MercadoLibre, Inc. “Oracle VM software worked seamlessly with our existing infrastructure and provided us with accelerated application deployment, enhanced scalability, reliability and availability we need to support our growing user base – while allowing us to reduce our space and energy footprint. Throughout the process we have had excellent support from Oracle and the extended Oracle community.”
“This project with MercadoLibre showcases, one more time, that Oracle is, each day, allowing more companies to deploy high-performance, enterprise-class solutions on the lowest cost hardware and operating system infrastructure. Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM have become the best choice for companies in need of upgrading their hardware and offer a great solution that fits seamlessly within their infrastructure,” said Luiz Meisler, Executive Vice President, Oracle Latin America.