Is it even possible to get the most out of your SQL Server resources while keeping the costs at bay? This brand new webinar recording presents three case studies of how we helped our customers to tackle the most common SQL Server estate issues such as growing costs, data sprawl, lack of visibility and workload volatility.
Contents of this blog post:
- Cutting IT costs without sacrificing availability or performance
- Webinar Recording: Get the most out of your SQL Server Resources
- CUSTOMER CASE: Server capacity optimization brought 47% licensing savings for a media company
- CUSTOMER CASE: Fact-based capacity plan and FCI failover analysis for a financial software provider
- CUSTOMER CASE: Centralized architecture and 62% less enterprise core licenses for an industrial company
Meeting business needs and budget requirements
The business environment has changed significantly – not just in recent months, but also in recent years. IT departments face huge pressure from management to make sure that their cost structure is aligned with business needs.
At the same time, DBAs are facing a number of issues in their SQL Server estates. Most typically these issues include data sprawl, lack of visibility, workload volatility, migrations that require too much manual work, and performance issues of unmodernized environments. The risk of overspending grows with each discovered issue.
Read more: What are the real reasons behind SQL Server performance issues?
Is it even possible to cut costs without sacrificing performance or availability?
In our customer projects we have discovered that while companies operate in different industries, they all struggle with the same dilemma: they all need to find immediate IT and data platform cost savings even though data platforms must be able to handle ever growing workloads without losing any revenue.
In other words, businesses in all industries are looking to find a solution where they can get the most out of their SQL Server resources without sacrificing the performance or availability of their systems.
And with SQL Governor, it is possible to do just that.
In June 2020 we teamed up with our partner Soaring Eagle Consulting and hosted a webinar where we described three interesting SQL Governor customer cases from the media, financial software and industry sectors.
Watch the 30-minute webinar recording and read the more in-detail customer cases below!
Watch the webinar recording
Customer case 1:
Server capacity optimization brought 47% licensing savings for a media company
Our first customer case of the webinar concerns a large media sector company with operations in publishing and digital commerce.
The challenges
At the beginning of the project, the company had two main challenges: how to lower the cost of operations and the environment as a whole, and how to secure the maintainability of the large environment. The environment was scattered with a mix of virtual machines and physical servers, there was uneven resource utilization and unsustainable service levels, and data sprawl was causing high platform costs. On top of that, some hardware was old and needed to be renewed.
The solution
We started out with SQL Server diagnostics and optimization and collected monitoring data for 6 months in order to discover the trends of the workloads and understand the behavioural characteristics of the environment. Based on the findings from the monitoring data, we were able to introduce three different architecture alternatives for the customer. Thanks to SQL Governor’s patented mechanism to analyse the workloads of individual instances, we were able to see which instances fit the best together. This allowed us to conduct instance-level consolidation planning into newer, bigger physical hosts and reduce the overall number of servers.
Benefits for customer
The customer found 47% cost savings in SQL Server licensing and a minimum of 30% cost savings in hardware costs. The project resulted in harmonized and optimized data platform performance and availability: instead of big differences in server performance, everything was running smoothly. IT professionals were able to concentrate on more productive tasks since the renewal resulted in far less routine operational tasks. Data sprawl was eliminated and according to the company’s CIO, running the renewed environment has also resulted in better service levels.
Customer case 2:
FCI failover analysis helped a financial software provider ensure cloud service availability and performance
Our second customer case concerns an independent software vendor that provides a cloud-based financial administration software for their clients.
The challenges
The customer was, first and foremost, looking to ensure the quality and continuity of their service and make sure that the cost of delivery would remain sustainable. The risk of overspending was high, since they had a large environment with several active-active FCIs with tens of thousands of client databases and a multitude of queries running simultaneously.
The solution
We set out to ensure the performance and availability of the environment by analysing how the instances would act in case of a failover. We went through many failover scenarios and built guidelines for database-driven workload redistribution based on the FCI failover analysis. An accurate, fact-based capacity plan for future hardware needs was also created.
Benefits for the customer
SQL Governor automates the SQL Server capacity planning by calculating the answers with machine learning, so instead of guesswork or time-consuming manual calculations, the customer gained a fact-based plan for the optimal capacity of the database platform. The plan included accurate predictions for future needs, so the customer gained cost savings worth of tens of thousands of dollars in the acquisition of new servers and licenses.
Customer case 3:
Centralized architecture and 62% less enterprise core licenses for an industrial company
The third case study features an industrial company that provides equipment for processing natural resources.
The challenges
The customer had trouble getting the overall picture of their SQL Server estate. Current level of utilization was not visible, and maintaining and monitoring the environment was needlessly difficult due to applying a new server for every new software or application. When we monitored the environment, we also noticed that there was very low CPU utilization, which meant significant consolidation needs for the servers.
The solution
Again, we started with SQL Server diagnostics and optimization. After analysis, we suggested a new centralized architecture and a fact-based capacity plan with fewer servers. The plan was driven by the existing virtual machines and customer’s consolidation needs.
Benefits for the customer
With SQL Governor, the customer can see the entire platform resource utilization within the servers, instances and databases. This holistic view makes the data platform significantly easier to manage and monitor. They also had 62 % less enterprise core licenses after our consolidation project, which meant considerable enterprise licensing cost savings.
Get a grip on your SQL Server estate
So there you have it. With the help of SQL Governor's automated solution, it is possible to get the most out of your data platform – now and in the future – without overspending.
If you wish to learn more, don't hesitate to book a free demo with us!
