Online Event Software Gets Disaster Recovery with SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring

Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Customer Solution Case Study

Online Event Software Gets Disaster Recovery with SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring

Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Professional Services

Customer Profile

Based in Memphis, Tennessee, ServiceU provides online software for ticket sales, event management, and event registration.

Business Situation

ServiceU needed to deploy a mirror of its database as part of its commitment to ensuring high availability, and it needed to enhance scalability to support its rapid growth.

Solution

ServiceU upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1 to take advantage of Database Mirroring for geographic redundancy, to enhance disaster recovery, and to gain enhanced performance to improve scalability.

Benefits

· Geographic redundancy for disaster recovery with SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring

· Scalability to support rapid growth

· Reduced scheduled downtime through use of SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing

· Enhanced developer productivity

“We feel that the geographic redundancy we get from SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring provides us with a tremendous strategic advantage.”

Tim Whitehorn, Chief Executive Officer, ServiceU

ServiceU helps organizations ranging in size from small churches to Fortune 500 companies operate concerts, conferences, and other events with its online event management software, including ticket sales, event registration, and facility and resource scheduling. The company needed to ensure high availability of its services, and increase its scalability to keep up with its rapid growth. The company upgraded its database to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1. The company uses the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005 to mirror its data at a geographically separate disaster recovery datacenter to help ensure high availability. ServiceU has reduced the need for scheduled downtime through use of SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing. Scalability has been enhanced as the move to SQL Server 2005 has helped reduce CPU utilization.

Situation

ServiceU is a provider of on-demand event management software that is used by churches, schools, businesses, and other organizations to manage concerts, conferences, and other events. The Web-based ServiceU solution provides a spectrum of services including online ticket sales, online event registration, box office management, room and resource scheduling, online calendars, and e-mail newsletters.

Organizations choose the services they want to make use of from a central control panel, creating their own custom solutions, and paying for only the services used. The control panel also allows organizers to customize the user experience by setting background colors, fonts, and even terminology, for example using ‘Groups’ instead of ‘Departments.’ Since pages can be customized to look like the customer’s site, visitors to the customer’s site have a seamless experience, eliminating confusion and customer service issues. By outsourcing critical event management processes to ServiceU, customers avoid the risks of data security and eliminate the complexities of in-house software.

Based in Memphis, Tennessee, the company has customers in all 50 states and 15 countries. ServiceU has been used to coordinate scheduling for more than 10 million events, serving clients ranging from small nonprofit organizations to Fortune 500 companies.

ServiceU has built a solid reputation, in part because of the seamless user experience and the high availability of the services—both of which depend on having a robust relational database to support concurrent users around the world generating some 2,000 transactions per second. Since moving to an application service provider (ASP) model in 1998, ServiceU has depended upon Microsoft® SQL Server™ database. Beginning with SQL Server version 7.0, and then SQL Server 2000, the company had always been happy with SQL Server processing power and reliability, and has long used Microsoft clustering technology to ensure high availability.

“Everything we do in our business—from transaction processing, to supporting our applications with business logic, to data storage—is dependent upon our databases,” says David P. Smith, Chief Technical Officer at ServiceU. “We are enjoying rapid growth, so we need to ensure our infrastructure can support us well into the future.”

As ServiceU looked toward upgrading its infrastructure, it needed a relational database that would support:

· Geographic redundancy to help ensure that its users worldwide would always be able to access their ServiceU solution, even in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.

· Scalability to support future growth.

· Online indexing to reduce impact on users during database maintenance.

· Transparent upgrade of databases to enable use of existing stored procedures.

· Enhanced developer productivity, as ServiceU creates its own applications.

Solution

ServiceU upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and recently installed SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 to take advantage of the SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring feature, which provides geographic redundancy for disaster recovery of data. SQL Server 2005 is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.

Using its own internal developers, ServiceU created its hosted software using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system and SQL Server stored procedures. The company has used an n-tier architecture that includes:

· Presentation Tier. Customers access the ServiceU site using a browser, avoiding the need for downloading client-side applications. The options users see are determined by the services selected by the customer’s administrator who uses a ServiceU control panel to pick and choose the services. The presentation tier uses Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server technology in the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system. The Presentation tier is hosted as a Web farm using Windows Server 2003 Network Load Balancing to dynamically distribute traffic across Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers, each with two processors and two gigabytes (GB) of RAM. Windows Server 2003 is the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software.

· Service-Oriented Architecture. ServiceU offers customers the ability to use its solution to create their own applications, using ServiceU for backend processing.

· Application Tier. The application tier includes a number of custom business objects ServiceU developers created to apply rules for ticketing, scheduling resources, checking for conflicts, handling payments, and other key functions. The application tier is co-hosted on the same servers as the presentation tier.

· Database Tier. ServiceU stores some 120 GB of data, with more than 20 million rows in the largest table, in a relational database hosted on a single named instance of SQL Server 2005. The database tier is hosted on a three-node active/passive cluster using Dell PowerEdge 2850 64-bit servers, each with 8 GB of RAM.

· Mirrored Database. To provide high availability of data, ServiceU is using the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005 to provide an asynchronous mirrored copy of data to a cluster at the company’s disaster recovery data center in Atlanta, Georgia. Database mirroring transfers transaction log records directly from one server to another and can quickly fail over to the standby system, with no loss of committed data. The mirror database cluster also runs on SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.

Benefits

ServiceU has enjoyed a number of benefits since upgrading to SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1, including geographic redundancy utilizing SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring, scalability to support rapid growth, reduced scheduled downtime through use of Online Indexing, and enhanced developer productivity.

Geographic Redundancy with SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring

Ensuring its customers get the best service possible is at the foundation of ServiceU’s success. “We recognize that our business is delivered completely over the Internet, and if we were to have an infrastructural problem it would adversely affect the customer’s experience, so we are very serious about minimizing downtime,” says Smith. “We take every measure that is feasible to ensure uptime, so after we opened our disaster recovery data center in Atlanta last year we began moving forward with plans to mirror our databases to that site.”

The company looked at a range of possible solutions, including a hardware-based mirroring system that would have cost the company U.S.$100,000 in the first year and continuing licensing fees. The company also considered a third-party software-based solution, but it posed significant potential integration issues.

“When we turned to SQL Server Database Mirroring we saw the opportunity to save the $100,000 that a hardware solution would have cost, while avoiding the potential integration problems posed by third-party software solutions,” says Smith. “We wanted a single-vendor solution so there could be no finger pointing if something went wrong. Our production system is our business, our livelihood. We must protect the interests of our customers. We don’t have room for mistakes, or ongoing issues. We need to be able to contact one support team if there is ever an issue so that we can quickly resolve the problem.”

In all SQL Server databases, data changes are recorded in the transaction log before any changes to actual data pages are made. The transaction log records are placed first in a database's log buffer in memory, and then flushed to disk (or 'hardened') as quickly as possible. In Database Mirroring, as the principal server writes the database's log buffer to disk, it simultaneously sends that block of log records to the mirror instance.

“The latency between our Memphis facility and our Atlanta facility is only 10 milliseconds —even with our triple DES [168-bit Data Encryption Standard] encryption,” says Smith. “This allows us to use asynchronous mirroring and commit the data to the Atlanta facility extremely quickly.”

Mirroring the database was especially important to the company because of Payment Card Industry (PCI) security certifications with which ServiceU must comply. The PCI security certifications are the credit card industry’s way of insuring that cardholder data that is transmitted or stored is secure. Depending on the transaction volume and other factors, a company may have to certify at one of several levels, which can include vulnerability scans, penetration scans, internal audits, network infrastructure requirements, specific encryption levels, and detailed policies and procedures that dictate the company’s reaction in different situations.

“We are a level-one PCI service provider, which is the highest level of certification,” Smith says. “This is an audited security certification, and there are rigorous requirements which must be met. In order to bring our systems online at a different facility after a disaster, we must show that we have implemented all of the level one PCI security precautions.”

By implementing Database Mirroring and keeping both sites certified, the company can very quickly make its Atlanta datacenter the primary facility in a disaster.

“This saves us what could be days or even weeks to both restore from tape and implement the numerous safeguards required by the payment card industry,” says Smith. “Database mirroring is essential to this process, as it allows us to have the entire geographically redundant site functional, certified, and ready to use at a moment’s notice.”

The company views its ability to provide high availability as a great marketing tool. “We feel that the geographic redundancy we get from SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring provides us with a tremendous strategic advantage,” says Tim Whitehorn, Chief Executive Officer at ServiceU. “We know that significant downtime for our customers would not only cause them an inconvenience, it would have a serious marketing impact on us. We now view our network’s reliability and redundancy as a major strategic factor for marketing our services. We compete against extremely large service providers. With database mirroring, network load balancing, and our other precautions, we have trumped the technical capabilities of our competition.”

Scalability to Support Rapid Growth

ServiceU is enjoying steady growth, so it is concerned about scalability. Its previous database, running on SQL Server 2000 and Windows® 2000 Server, and hosted on servers with four Xeon 700 processors and 4 GB of RAM, often ran at 40 percent to 60 percent of CPU capacity, not leaving much room for growth. ServiceU’s policy is to upgrade servers and bandwidth when they reach 60 percent of capacity. Due to this and the added need for geographic redundancy, ServiceU planned a hardware and software upgrade to SQL Server 2005.

After the company upgraded to SQL Server 2005 running on Windows Server 2003, hosted on servers with dual 3.8 gigahertz hyperthreaded processors, CPU utilization dropped to just 4 percent. “As soon as we started working with SQL Server 2005 we could see that it was much more efficient than SQL Server 2000,” says Smith. “With the combination of SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003, and the newer hardware, we were expecting a drop in CPU utilization, but we were astonished to see it go down to just four percent. We were very pleased. In addition, the ease of adding nodes to the SQL Server cluster means that we can increase computing power by adding new hardware very easily—and literally within minutes.”

“As the CEO of a company that is in a rapid growth mode, it was tremendous to see our CPU utilization drop to less than 5 percent,” says Whitehorn. “We have so much room to grow on our servers, that it made the entire upgrade project extremely worthwhile. We can grow our business without having to worry about additional database upgrades in the immediate future.”

The company found the Indexed Views feature of SQL Server 2005 significantly enhanced performance in key areas, including the display of a user’s home page, which provides a personalized listing of events that are waiting on approval. This information is pulled from tables, which contain millions of approved events, with only a small percentage that are pending approval.

“With the implementation of SQL Server 2005 Indexed Views on the Status Column of the customer’s home page, we were able to gain extraordinary and immediate improvements in performance with very few code changes,” says Micky McQuade, Software Engineer at ServiceU. “Home pages for our largest customers, that once took two to three seconds to load, now open in 200 to 300 milliseconds because of Indexed Views.”

Online Indexing to Reduce Scheduled Downtime

When your customer base spans the globe, it is extremely difficult to find a maintenance window that doesn’t affect someone. With SQL Server 2000, indexes were rebuilt once a month, requiring scheduled downtime.

“We have customers in North America, Europe, Asia, as well as Australia, so we don’t have a natural maintenance window,” says Smith. “We used to have to rebuild our indexes once a month. To minimize downtime we would defragment the indexes prior to going down to rebuild them, but during the defragging process the system responsiveness for users suffered. With SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing those index-related maintenance and downtime problems went away. Online Indexing has proven crucial to our efforts to reduce scheduled downtime.”

Enhanced Developer Productivity

ServiceU, which creates its own applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, has long benefited from the efficient development environment provided by Visual Studio and SQL Server. Developer productivity has been further enhanced with SQL Server 2005 native support of XML as a data type, and user-defined functions.

“Having native support for XML in SQL Server 2005 has greatly simplified the process of responding to customer requests for new features,” says Smith. “Support of XML gives us greater flexibility in working with stored procedures. We are always interested in responding to customer requests for new functionality, and XML support is allowing us to do so two to three times faster than we previously could.”

Development time is reduced through the use of user-defined functions, because common functionality can be introduced as a separate entity, without having to insert the full code into each stored procedure. “A simple example is the ability to verify the format of data from the calling application before inserting it into the database,” says Smith. “The code for these functions is very small, but with user-defined functions, which we began using as soon as it was introduced with SQL Server 2000, the code can now reside in one place rather than in every stored procedure that needs it.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on Windows Server 2003. It creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft’s holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem

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Software and Services

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Technologies

Microsoft Internet Information Services�

Hardware

Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers with dual processors and 2 GB of RAM for presentation and application tiers

Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers with dual processors and 8 GB of RAM for database tier�

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“With SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing those index-related maintenance and downtime problems went away. Online Indexing has proven crucial to our efforts to reduce scheduled downtime.”

David P. Smith, Chief Technical Officer, ServiceU

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“Home pages for our largest customers, that once took two to three seconds to load, now open in 200 to 300 milliseconds because of [SQL Server 2005] Indexed Views.”

Micky McQuade, Software Engineer, ServiceU

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© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published April 2006�

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For More Information

For 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 who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: � HYPERLINK "http://www.microsoft.com" ��www.microsoft.com�

For more information about ServiceU products and services, visit the Web site at: � HYPERLINK "http://www.ServiceU.com" ��www.ServiceU.com�

Solution Architecture – ServiceU architecture includes a presentation tier, an application tier with workflow and business rules, and the data tier.

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“When we turned to SQL Server Database Mirroring we saw the opportunity to save the $100,000 that a hardware solution would have cost, while avoiding the potential integration problems posed by third-party software solutions.”

David P. Smith, Chief Technical Officer, ServiceU

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Database Mirroring – Data from the Memphis headquarters is mirrored to the company’s disaster recovery site in Atlanta.