Solution Background

Our customer had been using an on-premises database solution for decades, but an expanding user base, emerging business needs such as multi-location access and the need for better performance required them to relook at their current architecture. They were experiencing severe performance degradation with a few thousand users accessing the data store. Moreover, during upgrades and power blackouts, data could not be accessed as there was no high availability built-in. Nor did they have a disaster recovery solution to guarantee access to their critical data in the event of a catastrophic failure. End user productivity was being hampered due to restricted access to data from outside their corporate office, resulting in delayed access to data and slow decision making. They were also exploring several new and modern LoB applications, all of which would make additional demands on their current infrastructure.

Quadra at work

As a trusted technology partner to our customer for over two decades, we documented their business pain points and needs, and developed a blue print for a scalable and reliable public cloud-based solution that would be inherently fail safe and always available. We evaluated the pros and cons of multiple public cloud solution, before zeroing in on the most appropriate solutions for their needs and budget. We also advocated a move to an open source platform for better performance and greater flexibility, along with reduced licensing costs. The new architecture consisted of a bare metal deployment with multiple clustered nodes to provide for high performance and availability. Data security was also a top priority, and we deployed a built-in enterprise grade DB security solution to ensure that their data was protected against both internal and external threats. A staging environment ensured a smooth transition from their on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud, without causing any end user disruption or downtime. A dedicated VPN tunnel was setup to provide a secure connection between their datacenter and the cloud deployment, with specific rules to lock down and minimize security threats.

As always, manageability is critical for the long-term success of a solution, and we again made use of built-in, enterprise class management tools to ensure that the infrastructure was always well monitored. This also assisted in fine tuning performance parameters, thereby ensuring that costs were always optimized.