MIGRATION AND CONSOLIDATION OF 40+ INSTANCES AND 200+ DATABASES
Following a Microsoft licensing audit, our client was facing a 1M euros bill. They decided to reduce the costs by 5 by consolidating and migrating to SQL 2016 SP1. Different phases composed this project, such as Inventory, Planning, Trace collection, Auditing, Bench-marking, Migration assistant, Migration, Performance Analysis, Optimisations, Follow up. At the end of the project, our client had much less servers to administer, SQL instances configured according to Microsoft best practices, better performance, and had saved hundreds of thousands of euros.
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
Our client had SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, MDS, all sitting together. The OLTP databases were cohabiting with the BI databases. All this led to security issues as well as some huge performance issues. Besides their datawarehouse was more a copy of certain tables but not a real datawarehouse designed to build cubes on top. We designed and put in place a new architecture to separate the roles, taking into account the budget restrictions. Once the new architecture was approved, we planned the migration and implemented it. The new topology now delivers much better performance. This also brought new business perspectives thanks to a real BI analysis.
PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATION
One of the world leaders in Retail had some massive performance issues. We optimised their queries and helped them reach some decent performance, customer satisfaction improving from “Very Frustrated” to “Very Satisfied”. Some of the queries went from 15 hours to 3s.
SQL SERVER HEALTH AND RISK AUDIT
Our client had all sorts of issues on their critical SQL Server, from connection timeouts to maintenance job failing, to important error messages such as a corrupted database in the error logs, etc. We delivered a SQL Health and Risk Audit which reported over 60 issues. They also asked us to help implement some of the recommendations. Their critical server is much more stable and they hardly have any issues to the point they no longer need in-house DBAs.
CONSOLIDATION AND OPTIMISATION OF SQL LICENSING COSTS FOR 46 INSTANCES
Our client had accumulated many different SQL Servers. You know how it works in real life, very often a new project sstarts with a new application, and the project team requests a new SQL instance. Over the years, the number of SQL instances explodes.
This client, anticipating a possible licensing audit, wanted to get back on track.
Our CONSOLIDATION and OPTIMISATION OF SQL LICENSING COSTS study which allows to control and get the best out of the SQL platforms in order to improve performance, save on resources, and save on licensing costs seemed perfect.
Some of the servers were under or over utilised because noone never actually did a proper performance analysis against each of the SQL instances. The editions were also poorly chosen.
We used a proactive approach:
- An audit of the SQL estate to consolidate
- A study of CONSOLIDATION and OPTIMISATION OF SQL LICENSING COSTS
- A consolidation roadmap
This service helped them save over 1M€!!! You can imagine how happy they were to be back on track and in control of their SQL Server estate.