Business Critical Application Always on, Always connectedexcelenciaconsulting.com › sites ›...
3
Business Critical Application Always on, Always connected Today most businesses have mounting needs for availability, and the window of tolerable downtime is swiftly disappearing. It is crucial that a robust mechanism pilots these tasks. For most companies, downtime is more than just an inconvenience. Indeed when a business’ applications aren’t available there is an immediate loss of productivity which can impact the company’s bottom line. In addition to the monetary loss, when a company’s applications and services are unavailable, there is the possibility of loss of customer confidence and company reputation. A study by Forrester Research showed that a 1-hour outage for the online broker firm eTrade resulted in a loss of $8 million. Similarly, a 10-hour outage at DELL was estimated to cost $83 million. More recently, an outage at PayPal was predicted to result in a $2,000 per second loss of income. According to Forrester the average downtime cost for a small to a mid-sized company is approximately valued at $150,000 per hour. Client Our client is a Full-Service Air, Ocean, Trucking, Customs Brokerage & Logistics Company. Since its inception, it has very quickly grown to more than $680 million in revenues with more than 100 locations in 26 countries. ey ship on an average 20 million kg of cargo per year, totaling over 1000 shipments per day. Challenges Our client had employed Microsoft SQL servers to handle their numerous SharePoint sites. e essential requirement for such application is uninterrupted availability, data backup, and restore. e snowballing of demands meant that during test phases and regular maintenance audits, failovers were a challenge. e client chose us as their partners to advice on technologies that could be used to minimize downtime and maximize data protection so that continuous access to business-critical data is always available. • e existing SQL setup was standalone and lot of databases were in simple recovery model, we were to identify them and change them to full recovery model • Drives were mismatching between the Primary and Secondary replicas. Pushing us to re-configure SQL statements for restoring databases on secondary. • Absence of existing vendor handover and in-house DBA for real time scenario advice Hidden challenges
Transcript of Business Critical Application Always on, Always connectedexcelenciaconsulting.com › sites ›...
Business Critical Application Always on, Always connected
Today most businesses have mounting needs for availability, and the window of tolerable downtime is swiftly disappearing. It is crucial that a robust mechanism pilots these tasks. For most companies, downtime is more than just an inconvenience. Indeed when a business’ applications aren’t available there is an immediate loss of productivity which can impact the company’s bottom line. In addition to the monetary loss, when a company’s applications and services are unavailable, there is the possibility of loss of customer confidence and company reputation.
A study by Forrester Research showed that a 1-hour outage for the online broker firm eTrade resulted in a loss of $8 million. Similarly, a 10-hour outage at DELL was estimated to cost $83 million. More recently, an outage at PayPal was predicted to result in a $2,000 per second loss of income. According to Forrester the average downtime cost for a small to a mid-sized company is approximately valued at $150,000 per hour.
ClientOur client is a Full-Service Air, Ocean, Trucking, Customs Brokerage & Logistics Company. Since its inception, it has very quickly grown to more than $680 million in revenues with more than 100 locations in 26 countries. They ship on an average 20 million kg of cargo per year, totaling over 1000 shipments per day.
ChallengesOur client had employed Microsoft SQL servers to handle their numerous SharePoint sites. The essential requirement for such application is uninterrupted availability, data backup, and restore. The snowballing of demands meant that during test phases and regular maintenance audits, failovers were a challenge. The client chose us as their partners to advice on technologies that could be used to minimize downtime and maximize data protection so that continuous access to business-critical data is always available.
• The existing SQL setup was standalone and lot ofdatabases were in simple recovery model, we wereto identify them and change them to full recoverymodel
• Drives were mismatching between the Primary and
Secondary replicas. Pushing us to re-configure SQL statements for restoring databases on secondary.
• Absence of existing vendor handover and in-houseDBA for real time scenario advice
Hidden challenges
Solution As with most applications, to facilitate availability, overall sound architecture and resilience that can endure unforeseen anomalies, a lot of planning and consideration was required. We presented several viable options to the client. A high-availability strategy was an essential requirement for a production SharePoint Server environment. After carefully studying the pros and cons of each solution suggested, the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature was chosen without incurring any additional licensing costs. AlwaysOn enhances the existing technologies of database mirroring and failover clustering to provide a stable layer of high availability and disaster recovery that minimizes Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
We took a 5 step process to dismantle the existing system and homogeneously put it back together:
1. Complete database backup – Moved all backup files from primary to secondary
2. Dropped databases from existing availability group – After back up we dropped old databases in the secondary node
3. Restored full backups with no recovery in secondary node – dropped the old databases in secondary replica and restored all the full backups with no-recovery
4. Database differential backups and restored with no recovery – stopped all the sharepoint servers connected to DB servers and took differential backup of primary replica and moved those files to the Secondary replica to restore it with no recovery option
5. Database log backups and restored with no recovery – log backup for all databases in primary replica and restored those with no recovery in secondary replica.
With this, primary and secondary replicas were in sync, and the availability group status was healthy. This entire setup was implemented within a 24-hour period and with negligible downtime.
The marriage of high availability and disaster recovery in a
single framework now makes this system one of the most
unfailing solutions in its class. Some tangible business
benefits include –
• Minimized failover time – Reduced up to 20 seconds of downtime that amounts to less than an hour in the
entire year
• Saved $300,000 or more of impact – Failure
prevention of a business critical application
• Real Time Reports – Real-time actionable insights and
reports from the SQL servers.• Relaxed Bandwidth Usage – Efficient in its utilization
of bandwidth resulting in decreasing infrastructural
congestion• Maintenance contract acquired – Delighted
clients consequential in successive agreements for
maintenance
Benefits
ConclusionCreating a highly available infrastructure depends on more than just selecting the right technologies. Technology doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Instead, people use these technologies for supporting the needs of the business. In other words, when you are not compelled to choose a specific commit mode, the AlwaysOn availability groups can offer you robustness to deal with high availability scenario while providing you the flexibility to tackle a recovery scenario where servers are located remotely. Business Continuity Management is a sequence of current and interlocking directives. When done correctly, it aligns with a firm’s strategic priorities and could help to mitigate risks and meet regulatory requirements.
About Excelencia
Excelencia is an ISO 9001 certified service provider for IT Services. We are headquartered in Austin, Texas.
With over 10 years of experience serving emerging enterprises in USA, UK, Europe, Australia & Middle East, we boast of working with over 150 clients across technologies. We provide value-added solutions with a clear focus on quality and endeavor to be a long-term partner addressing all aspects of our clients.
Through a single point of accountability, we offer end-to-end, enterprise-class IT solutions, including cloud and on-premise solutions, managed services, enterprise application management and other professional services.
