Case Study: Italgas cuts backups from 15 hours to 15 minutes and boosts Oracle performance with NetApp (Azure NetApp Files)

Italgas energizes its Oracle investments by switching to Azure NetApp Files

Italgas, Italy’s leading gas distributor (serving 1,800+ municipalities and managing 7.5 million meters), migrated its data center to Microsoft Azure in 2018 and moved 55 large Oracle databases for mission‑critical apps like finance, metering, and billing. However, native Azure disk storage tied capacity to VM performance, forcing overprovisioning, causing service interruptions when changing disks, driving up costs, and stretching backups to as long as 15 hours.

After a proof-of-concept, Italgas adopted Azure NetApp Files to enable hot-resize volumes, instant snapshots and clones, dynamic tiering, and “volume shaping.” By moving production and development to Azure NetApp Files, backups fell from 15 hours to 15 minutes, database refreshes moved from days to hours, storage costs dropped through right‑sized volumes, and IT gained faster, more flexible testing and innovation.

Italgas

Giuliano Caglio

Cloud Services and Infrastructure