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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GOVERNOR (New-generation database capacity planning optimization)

Teaser

Summary

There are 300,000 companies running thousands of database servers in the EU, but there are surprisingly few tools available to improve or automate capacity optimization. Database capacity planning and optimization currently relies heavily on manual efforts for analysis and resource allocation. In large companies with 800 or more servers, service fees and investment in licenses alone represented 42% of annual budget. Apart from increasing costs for energy, hardware and software licenses for operating more servers, this over dimensioning causes unnecessary management overhead, resulting in a critical loss of efficiency through misallocation of resources.
Our solution, GOVERNOR, offers a disruptive and revolutionary optimization service through automated capacity planning, for which there is no comparable technical alternative at the moment. Instead of attempting to solve the challenges of capacity planning manually, GOVERNOR automatically calculates the optimal server configuration for a target architecture, resulting in significant cost savings and a more robust and efficient target server architecture.
We have set a complete list of future objectives that should position GOVERNOR as the technical reference in the field. These technical requirements can be distributed along 5 different Development Areas: Architecture enhancements, Capacity Planning improvements, Horizontal Platform expansion, UI adaptation and Productizing/Licensing. In terms of commercial objectives, we have been able to design a complete commercialization strategy through the participation of key partners and early adopters, as well as the increased participation in global events. This strategy will allow us to rapidly expand our operations across the EU.

Work performed

Over the course of the Phase I project, we were able to validate the technical feasibility of GOVERNOR, by assessing the remaining technical requirements, as well as the corresponding risks and mitigation measures, for the development of GOVERNOR up to a TRL of 9. We identified the main development areas and set specific milestones for each one, including a detailed calendar for each particular release of GOVERNOR, up to release number 10.

We also performed a complete Freedom to Operate Analysis through the examination of global patent application databases, which successfully confirmed the innovative and unique characteristics of GOVERNOR. Additionally, on the IPR front, we also identified further patentable technology in our future development plan.

The validation of the commercial feasibility involved the in-depth analysis of suitable sales channels, as well as other potential partners in the PASS network. This analysis included extensive research to identify global trends and market opportunities and risks, as well as specific examples of business opportunities. The research allowed us to validate the complete commercial feasibility and identify the best approach towards full commercialization after the Phase II project.

Finally, in order to validate the financial feasibility, we also developed a complete Business plan with an exhaustive review of future revenues and costs, leading to a conservative sales forecast and ROI analysis for the 5 years following the full commercialization of GOVERNOR. The analysis includes a deep assessment of commercial risks associated with expanding our geographical markets.

Final results

Currently, state-of-the-art capacity planning focuses mostly on optimizing the storage capacity rather than the server capacity. Capacity planning and server expansion is performed manually, using dedicated servers for each application.

With Governor, we will introduce the concept of automatic capacity planning which will allow cost reduction up to 50% by optimizing hardware resources in server operations. Our solution significantly reduces database expenses, and increase profits by cutting unnecessary overhead.

Another significant challenge in large server operations are server migrations and modernization. All companies have to migrate and modernize their server platform more or less frequently. Currently, migration planning is typically done following a mostly manual approach. As Governor automatically provides a capacity plan for a SQL server platform, it is bound to become an indispensable tool to streamline large migration and modernization projects.

As a whole, the problem of database capacity inefficiency is currently being overlooked by many enterprises with large data centres, as they are not aware of the true potential of database capacity planning. This issue is responsible for widespread waste and misallocation of valuable technological and financial resources worldwide. Governor provides a unique solution for this problem, using proprietary optimization algorithms and extensive and automated workload analysis to achieve uniquely accurate capacity planning.