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With its focus on helping people to share information, Ricoh originally started out by marketing two communication products: sensitised paper and cameras. Since then, the company has developed a number of innovative image processing technologies over the years and capitalised on these to offer many revolutionary products and services that help customers improve productivity and create knowledge. Ricoh's main products, including copiers and MFPs, represent the accumulation of technologies in electro photography, imaging, chemistry, optics, network, software, and a slew of other areas over many years. Combining such technological excellence built over the years with newly developed technologies, Ricoh aims to continue to create new value that has never been seen before and deliver it to the world.

Now one of the world's leading printing and document management companies, Ricoh is using Oracle's SPARC T5 servers with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances and Oracle Database to analyse data from RICOH @Remote, its real-time support service for customers in more than 100 countries and regions. The service monitors and collects thousands of data points from several million multi-function printers, including number of pages printed, toner levels and print settings, and provides reports on configuration and operating status.

MINE OF INFORMATION
By mining this data, Ricoh saw an opportunity to enhance customer satisfaction by transforming its service model from reactive to proactive and provide its customers with an even better experience by using the data to predict and detect potential problems before they happen, optimise the frequency of maintenance and inspection visits, and minimise device downtime.

Recognising that unifying the data across the company would provide the most accurate view and analysis, Ricoh built a private cloud accessible by the entire RICOH @Remote group that would allow high speed access from internal networks. SPARC T5 servers with Oracle Solaris and Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 Appliances are being used for data analysis with the ZFS Storage ZS3 Series also acting as an operational data store for data from RICOH @Remote.

"Our RICOH @Remote data is housed in Oracle Database, which made a private cloud based on Oracle's SPARC T5 servers and ZFS Storage ZS3 a natural choice for accumulating, processing and analysing big data from RICOH @Remote," said Toshiaki Sato, deputy general manager, Development Process Innovation Center, Ricoh Company, Ltd. "Oracle also has rich insights about analysing big data and building cloud infrastructure and we knew that the solution would be ideal for accommodating future growth."

Using Oracle hardware and software has provided Ricoh several advantages, including faster data transfer rates and eliminating storage performance bottlenecks with 40Gbps InfiniBand and simultaneous parallel processing that supports the demanding transaction requirements of big data analysis. Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3 also provides a cost-effective and highly-scalable backup infrastructure for Ricoh's private cloud and real-time performance analysis via the DTrace Storage Analytics tool.

The Oracle-based cloud also provides Ricoh the headroom needed to accommodate future growth. Oracle Advanced Compression and Hybrid Columnar Compression has compressed Ricoh's actual data to less than 30 percent and with the scalability of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, Ricoh will be able to cost-efficiently scale its backup infrastructure as RICOH @Remote data grows.
More info: www.oracle.com