Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2Customer Solution Case Study

SaaS Provider’s Data Solution Supports 600 Percent Growth, 400 Percent Productivity Gain

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services

Customer ProfileWebtrends, based in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, provides worldwide services in web analytics, social media measurement, and paid-search optimization. It has 400 employees.

Business SituationWhen Webtrends wanted to shift an outsourced service offering to a software-as-a-service model, it needed a database system that would meet vastly higher technical requirements.

SolutionThe company upgraded its Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard software to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise to adopt partitioning, multitenant hosting, and failover clustering.

Benefits Customer base increased by 600

percent Speed of server response doubled Uptime boosted to 99.999 percent Productivity of database administrators

increased by 400 percent

“By shifting Optimize to a SaaS model, we’ve been able to expand our customer base, operate more cost-effectively, and increase revenues. And we made SaaS a reality with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.”

Bruce Kenny, Executive Vice President, Technology and Hosted Systems, Webtrends

The Microsoft database on which Webtrends ran its Optimize service offering was no longer the right choice for a solution that needed vastly increased levels of scalability, performance, and reliability for a software-as-a-service model. So Webtrends upgraded its Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard software to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and saw a meteoric rise in the measures that mattered most: The data architecture easily scaled out 300 percent to support a 600 percent increase in customers. Server responsiveness became twice as fast, producing sub-second response times. Uptime rose to a virtually continuous 99.999 percent. And, helping to keep costs low, the productivity of database administrators rose by 400 percent.

SituationWebtrends needed a database that would support the increased requirements of a fast-growing business; but the Microsoft database that it used would not provide the scalability, performance, and reliability that it needed.

In 2009, Webtrends—a pioneer in the field of web analytics—acquired Widemile and that company’s solution for optimizing digital marketing. Until the acquisition, Widemile had been offered as a fully managed solution for testing and targeting digital content to specific audience segments in real time. Under that model, Widemile staff received marketing data from the company’s customers, ran the tests on their behalf, and then delivered the results to them. The company operated Widemile on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard data management software, which fully met its needs.

When Webtrends acquired Widemile, it had big plans for the solution. It renamed the product Webtrends Optimize, and changed the offering to a software-as-a-service (SaaS), or private cloud, model. The move gave customers anytime, anywhere self-service access to Webtrends Optimize—providing a level of immediacy and convenience not available in a managed solution model.

The new business model for Webtrends Optimize required changes in how the solution was supported, marketed, and priced. One key change had to be in the database that supported the solution. With a vastly expanded customer base for the solution, Webtrends required a system that could scale quickly, reliably, and gracefully

to support the inherent volatility of Internet traffic as well as the solution’s continued growth.

Webtrends wanted its customers to have a real-time experience with Webtrends Optimize, which required real-time performance. It wanted Optimize to be available to customers whenever they chose to use it, which required high availability.

And there was one thing that Webtrends didn’t want: more IT staff and budget. Instead, the company wanted its IT staff to operate Optimize with new levels of efficiency, productivity, and cost-effectiveness.

“Our Optimize solution had run on SQL Server for several years without a problem,” says Bruce Kenny, Executive Vice President, Technology and Hosted Systems at Webtrends. “With our continued growth and the overall demand for Optimize, we needed a data management solution that scaled with us without additional overhead. We needed to enhance our core database to address today’s and tomorrow’s requirements.”

SolutionWebtrends Optimize had already been created for high performance and reliability technologies, such as partitioning, indexing, and failover clustering, which were not supported in the SQL Server software on which the solution had run. “Optimize was originally run on SQL Server Standard for cost reasons, but it had been designed for high performance and high availability so that it could take advantage of those capabilities when the time was right,” says

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“With our continued growth and the overall demand for Optimize, we needed a data management solution that scaled with us without additional overhead.”

Bruce Kenny, Executive Vice President, Technology and Hosted Systems,

Webtrends

Peter Crossley, Director of Product Architecture at Webtrends. “Now, the time was right.”

Kenny, Crossley, and their colleagues had to decide how to pair Optimize with a database that would help the solution meet its new challenges. “While alternatives were available, such as open source MySQL and PostgreSQL, and commercial software such as Oracle, the strong results with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in Webtrends’ other products made it our priority target for Optimize,” says Kenny. “Webtrends had experience with the open source solutions that showed they could not provide the performance and cost effectiveness we needed, and Oracle was not a desired addition to the Webtrends technology stack. Total cost of ownership and product quality and performance drove our decision to stay with the SQL Server platform.”

This brought Webtrends back to where it had started—almost. While Optimize had grown beyond the target market for its SQL Server Standard software, it had also grown directly into the target market for SQL Server Enterprise. That market consists of companies using SQL Server in large-scale, mission-critical applications with particular needs for scalability, performance, and data warehousing and business intelligence.

“We were already using SQL Server; we knew SQL Server, and adopting SQL Server Enterprise would deliver the functionality we were looking for,” says Crossley.

A Solution for Scalability and Performance

The company first adopted SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, then upgraded to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, including SQL Server Integration Services. With these upgrades, Webtrends can support Optimize with scalability and performance features such as IA64 hardware support; table and index partitioning; and high availability features such as failover clustering for up to 16 nodes, online indexing, and the hot addition of memory and CPU (i.e., the ability to add hardware without rebooting a computer).Webtrends started with three pairs of failover clusters of SQL Server, with one database instance hosted on each of six HP ProLiant G7 servers. The hardware servers each have 16 processors and 72-GB RAM. Webtrends has since scaled out the architecture horizontally to 12 pairs of failover clusters. In addition to providing the additional capacity that Webtrends now needs, the move gives the company the ability to scale up the solution vertically as demand continues, by adding multiple database instances per hardware server.

A Model for the Largest CustomersEach database instance uses a multitenancy model to host about 80 to 100 customers, with the exact number depending on the amount of data associated with those customers. A typical customer generates 75 to 100 million events per year, with an event defined as a user interaction on a website. That number soars to more than 2 billion events per year for the company’s largest customers.

Webtrends uses SQL Server partitioning to subdivide each database table into as many as 1,000 partitions, one for each marketing experiment (or test) that it presents to a

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“The strong results with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in Webtrends’ other products made it our priority target for Optimize.”

Bruce Kenny, Executive Vice President, Technology and Hosted Systems,

Webtrends

customer. With data sets organized into relatively small partitions, Webtrends can report on experiments efficiently, update partitions dynamically, and deploy failover partitions without interrupting other services in the same table or instance.

To help achieve the scalability that it needs, Webtrends used SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with the NetApp high-performance 3210 storage solution with 512-MB cache. This increased the storage throughput and capacity available to Optimize by about 400 percent, while upgrading the features, functionality, manageability, and scalability available through the NetApp solution. “The ability to switch to high-capacity storage while remaining on the same database platform was huge for us,” says Crossley. “It helped to make the transition to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise seamless. This would have been much harder to do with another database system.”

Benefits“Our success with Optimize as a premier SaaS testing and targeting solution powered by SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise

is outstanding,” says Kenny. “We have a high-performance, cost-effective, and scalable solution that is growing by leaps and bounds. We have made SaaS a reality with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.”

Customers Increase by 600 Percent To make the software-as-a-service model work for Optimize, Webtrends needed a database that would scale to support more customers, larger customers, and the spikes in traffic that would almost certainly come from an increased customer base. With SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, Webtrends has achieved this scalability. Since deploying the new database architecture, it has scaled it out by 300 percent, supporting a 600 percent increase in its customer base.

To support the traffic volume, swings, and spikes that come with those additional customers, Webtrends combines horizontal scaling with data partitioning. The architecture initially supported 10,000 web connections per minute. With the scaling and partitioning, it now supports at least 300,000 connections per minute.

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Figure 1. When Webtrends uses the scale-out and load-balancing capabilities in SQL Server, it can cut response time in half. (Compare April 19 and April 20 data to April 21 data.)

Webtrends uses SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise not just to support more customers and more traffic, but also to support larger customers. Previously, Webtrends could support only about 1 billion events per year on a database instance. With SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, that number is up 1,000 percent, to 10 billion events per database per year.

Speed of Server Response DoubledWebtrends wanted enough performance from its new database system for customers to have real-time experiences with Optimize. With SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, Webtrends has achieved that level of performance.

The software’s partitioning capability is one key to achieving that performance. By splitting large tables of data into smaller pieces, partitioning makes it possible for data queries that access only a fraction of a table to run faster because they have less data to scan.

“The partitioning capability in SQL Server 2008 R2 was reason enough for us to adopt the software,” says Crossley. “And Microsoft is going even further. We understand that ‘Denali’ [codename for the next SQL Server release] will increase the partitioning capability by a factor of 10 to 10,000 partitions per table. The more granular the partitions, the more efficient Optimize can be, and the more performance our customers will see.”

To boost performance, Webtrends also relies on scaling out the architecture and the added capacity that the scaling provides to balance loads among servers. For example, Webtrends used vertical

scaling and load balancing for just that purpose toward the end of April 2011. As a result, server response times were cut in half, to less than 1 second (see Figure 1).

Uptime Boosted to 99.999 PercentWebtrends uses a combination of failover clustering and partitioning to achieve the high availability it needs for its Optimize service.

Its use of clustering helps to minimize both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. By failing over one node of a cluster to its pair, Webtrends can implement updates and maintenance more quickly, without inconveniencing customers. During unplanned downtime, Webtrends relies on failover clustering to keep the service operational so that the customer experience is not affected. Both scenarios contribute to higher uptime. The company’s use of partitioning minimizes the portion of a database that might be affected by either planned or unplanned downtime, helping Webtrends to avoid restarts of entire servers and to keep more of the database available to customers.

With these technologies, Webtrends has increased Optimize uptime from its previous range of 85 to 90 percent, to its current level of 99.999 percent—the “five nines” that constitute virtually continuous availability.

“The high availability of Optimize is crucial to its success as an online service,” says Crossley. “And SQL Server is crucial to our ability to deliver that availability.”

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“The partitioning capability in SQL Server 2008 R2 was reason enough for us to adopt the software.”

Peter Crossley, Director of Product Architecture, Webtrends

Productivity of Database Administrators Increased by 400 PercentWebtrends also uses SQL Server to achieve its goals for increased manageability and IT productivity—factors that make it possible to increase the customer base and the infrastructure to support that customer base, without similarly increasing staff size and costs.

For example, Optimize had previously relied on a library of 5,000 lines of stored procedures that had taken two years to write and then proved difficult to manage and update. Using SQL Server Integration Services, developers replaced those stored procedures with a more effective, easier-to-manage packet translation service in a week.

“Our development and management activity is just so much more efficient and agile with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise,” says Crossley. “We built the ability to deploy modules dynamically into Optimize, which in turn makes it possible for us to provide higher levels of service and support to our customers.”

Because updates are easier to create and deploy, Webtrends deploys them more frequently. Previously, it deployed updates every six to eight months. Now, using the hot deploy capability in SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, it does so every 10 to 12 weeks.

As it envisioned, Webtrends uses its newfound agility and manageability to support more customers, more data, more traffic, and more infrastructure—without more staff. The number of database administrators for the infrastructure actually fell by 20 percent—from five to four—since the SaaS model was adopted, while the number of servers grew by 300 percent. That represents a 400 percent increase in the productivity of database administrators.

“We’re using SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise to be far more productive—and to deliver far more for our customers—than we could with standard edition software,” says Crossley.Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers higher scalability for mission-critical environments, more efficient IT, and expanded reporting and analytics through self-service business intelligence.

For more information about Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, go to: www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2-editions.aspx

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Webtrends products and services, visit the website at: www.webtrends.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Enterprise

Technology− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Integration Services

Hardware HP ProLiant G7 servers