client study 5: leading supermarket chain
DESCRIPTION
Design, implementation and management of a highly resilient and available SQL Server solution to significantly decrease Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives.TRANSCRIPT
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Electron House, Bridge Street, Sandiacre, Nottingham, NG10 5BA Phone: 0845 222 9600
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‘Design, implementation and management of a highly resilient / available SQL
server solution to significantly decrease Recovery Time Objectives / Recovery Point
Objectives’
Client Study 5: Leading Supermarket Chain
Our client is a leading supermarket chain, operating a mission-critical business
application deployed on Microsoft SQL Server technology. They are dependent on
maintaining a high-degree of data resilience and availability throughout an extended
period of growth.
Issues:
Legacy application
Non-supported database technology
Aging hardware
30% year on year compound business growth
The customer had been experiencing a sustained period of compound growth (circa
30% year on year), which is predicted to continue for the foreseeable future.
Prompted by this forecasted success, the customer re-evaluated the IT solutions and
made the decision to re-architect and implement a solution which could scale to meet
with the projected growth over a 5 year period.
This project would involve network upgrades, hardware refresh, Microsoft SQL Server
evaluation / design and an application upgrade, with all of these requiring the
management and support of its associated partner prior to the go-live date.
It was crucial that the solution allowed for a high level of data resilience and offered
the necessary scalability to comfortably cope with the forecasted growth throughout
the five-year plan. To this point the client had been operating a single SQL Server
instance with localised log shipping. This setup had been poorly designed and
configured, a fact that quickly became apparent as the business experienced a period
of rapid growth. The evaluation of this environment identified extremely high RTO and
RPO’s, while offering a low level of database and data resilience.
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Electron House, Bridge Street, Sandiacre, Nottingham, NG10 5BA Phone: 0845 222 9600
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The client specifically stipulated in their brief that they wanted assurance that they
could still operate a fully functioning business, free from performance constraints,
even if their current primary data-centre should be wiped out through unavoidable
circumstance.
Xynomix’s Solution:
The initial architecture and implementation of the client’s mission-critical systems,
combined with 24/7 monitoring and support with an aim to significantly increase data-
resilience and availability.
Xynomix’s initial task was to design a solution based around a detailed assessment of
the client’s business, data-criticality and availability requirements. As outlined in the
client’s brief, it was essential that their systems remained functional, even in the event
of a complete data-centre failure.
The Xynomix team designed and proposed a highly available solution operating over 2
datacentre locations. Each datacentre would consist of a 2-node active/passive
Microsoft SQL Server cluster, underpinned by a clustered VMware infrastructure
(provisioned by the client hardware supplier) and having suitable CPU / Memory
capacity to scale up as the business demand increases.
Utilising Microsoft SQL Server replication (locally and cross-site) Xynomix were then
able to provide further levels of data resilience to ensure that two identical sets of
business data were consistently maintained.
The system design and implementation process was subsequently backed up with a
24x7x365 proactively monitored/managed support service, ensuring that key system
indicators remained within their pre-determined parameters. The customer has
remained fully-informed of support and maintenance demands throughout, ensuring
that they are able to continuously measure the project success against the projected
business plan.
Key Skills Used: SQL Server design, Windows clustering, SQL Server Replication and
general troubleshooting
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Electron House, Bridge Street, Sandiacre, Nottingham, NG10 5BA Phone: 0845 222 9600
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Client Benefits:
Increased data resilience with vastly reduced RTO’s and RPO’s as a part of a pro-active
managed support service.
Following the implementation of the Xynomix solution and on-going support contract,
the customer is now comfortable that their business would be able to continue as
normal in the event of a data centre disaster, with the time taken to recover from such
a disaster having been largely minimised.
Data resilience has been significantly increased with the utilisation of cross-site
replication and multiple datacentre locations. Maintaining two ‘transactionally
identical’ sets of data is now a standard business practice and provides the customer
with multiple commercial and operational benefits.
The provision of a ‘Xynomix Proactive Management Services’ ensures that any system
changes are immediately noted and addressed before they become a noticeable issue
to the end-user or business process. Proactive monitoring guarantees that agreed
parameters are consistently maintained.
In summary the client is now operating a resilient Microsoft SQL Server architecture
that remains fully scalable moving forwards, allowing for the successful realisation of
their five-year growth plan. Xynomix have continued to work with the customer
continuously since the project commenced in 2011.
www.xynomix.com