SCS designed and developed state-of-the-industry database DR processes, including the implementation of cloud-hosted offsite database backups. SCS also designed and deployed Microsoft’s newest offering in high availability (HA), AlwaysOn Availability Groups for SQL. AlwaysOn is a great fit for the client. It allows for immediate, automated DR in the case of systems failure, while simultaneously improving core application performance by leveraging readable secondaries for read-only report requests, plus offloading of backup workloads.
AlwaysOn is a multidisciplinary technology that relies on coordinating Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) expertise along with SQL Server database administration best practices. It takes an experienced consultant to implement this solution. SCS was chosen because of its track record of excellence and history of accomplishments with the client.
There were some custom features required in order to make the client’s core enterprise application, Tessitura, compatible with AlwaysOn. Tessitura is a legacy application that relies on SQL agent jobs to maintain application data integrity for multiple processes. SCS developed custom scripts, SQL agent alerting, and failover procedures to manage the enabling/disabling of read/write required jobs whenever AlwaysOn replica roles change from primary to secondary. SCS also created a custom process to synchronize database server logins across the replicas, since Tessitura relies on scripted collation changes. This meant that database containment was not an option in the near term.
SCS also designed and implemented a custom solution for managing database backup, index maintenance and integrity checks based on de facto industry standard scripts. The solution has cut backup AND index processing time by 50% and includes regular health check monitoring that was not performed before. In addition, the scripts can also backup and archive directly to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service offering, for secure, redundant, cost-effective offsite storage.
