One of the world’s largest multimedia content providers was looking for a way to increase the level of user satisfaction by improving the performance of their enormously huge database system. They wanted to leverage operational best practices to increase resiliency/uptime, performance, and scalability at the lowest possible cost. DB Best provided the customer with the day-to-day operational data management services both on-premises and in the cloud, as well as configured the new architecture for their cloud-based system.
Discover the benefits of the outsource Operational Data Management (ODM) solution from the following video.
Key Operational Data Management Project Goals
The original customer’s system included over 300 database instances, which were spread between various environments, such as production, development, test, performance, and disaster recovery. The customer was using Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL databases.
Initially, the operational data management agreement included monitoring of customer’s Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL databases. Our time investment in creating the documentation set for the remaining customer’s databases led to an additional contract, which provided our team with the task to support all database instances, as well as design the future state architecture for their data and application solutions in the cloud.
Basically, DB Best proposed to do work on designing, developing and deploying a Database Management System. The key goals were:
- Standardization of operational tasks across all database instances.
- Combination of centralized and local manageability processes working in sync.
- Ability to manage tasks and processes across all database instances.
- Design of processes aligned with environments and settings.
- Up-to-date methods of performing different proactive and regular data management tasks across multiple servers.
As a result, the scope of work included:
- Work on Future State Architectural Design of Data Management System.
- Development of processes and code of the Data Management System.
- Testing of the Data Management System.
- Deployment of the Data Management System.
Watch the following video overview to learn more about DB Best operational data management service.
The DB Best Approach
First of all, we installed DBMSys, our proprietary agentless monitoring platform, in the customer’s infrastructure. DBMSys allows for capturing key performance metrics in real-time. It dives really deep into customer’s infrastructure and locates sophisticated situations. In addition, DBMSys sends alerts to the 24×7 support center, so that the DBAs from both customer’s and DB Best teams can address the occurred issues.
Also, our team runs and manages the 24×7 network operations center that is staffed 365 days a year. This support center receives system generated alerts and addresses them under a pre-defined set of rules. We call it Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).
This set of documents defines actions to take against a myriad of circumstances. As a part of ongoing operational data management activity, our team updated this documentation. Also, we created new SOP from scratch, if needed.
In addition to monitoring software and the set of documents, our team provided the customer with both onsite and remote resources. They address not only the occurring issues but the ongoing operational needs as well. Our team proved that we they can resolve the most difficult situations, occurring in the customer’s environment.
All incoming trouble tickets have the severity of the issues as defined by our customer. We address the issues with priority 1 and 2 as soon as possible. For lower-priority issues, we provide the customer’s DBAs with the suggestions on how to resolve them.
As for the proactive phase of the operational data management project, we developed suggestions on modernizing the customer’s infrastructure. Implementing these suggestions would result in lowering the number of high-priority issues. However, the obvious target is to move the customer’s system to the cloud…
DB Best Operational Data Management Services
Operational Data Management is usually a long-term engagement, which may last for years. So, it’s really critical to find a reliable partner for ODM services. Addressing ongoing operational needs is only the tip of the iceberg. Proactive data management allows for addressing the real reason for occurred issues. This is how you can craft the flawless architecture of the database system.
Our customer was impressed with ongoing DB Best Operational Data Management services, so they decided to go beyond addressing the reactive problems, and delegate our team the right to proactively address system issues, which are at the core of the customer’s system. As a part of the contract extension agreement, our team started working on the future-state architectural design of the customer’s data infrastructure. They were considering to move their database instances to the highly available, secure and easily scalable cloud.
Then we created the new architectural solution for the customer’s complex database system and proposed to deploy it in the Amazon cloud. With this reliable solution, our customer can avoid the majority of current issues of the original database system.
Designing a New Architecture on AWS
Our database architects convinced the customer that correcting the existing system is going to take more time and efforts than designing and developing a new one. So, we came up with a completely new architecture solution that allows for increasing the system’s performance and makes the database system management clear and transparent. We implemented the new task-based architecture that foresees local task management with central oversight and helped our customer reaching the new level of database performance.
As part of a planned global move to Amazon cloud, our customer needs to move a 7 TB in-house media manager database application to the AWS cloud. In this effort, our ODM team will configure primary and replicate databases to production, development, test, performance and disaster recovery servers.
Customer’s Benefits
After completing the move to the cloud, we’re going to continue operational support of the newly designed system. But for now, our customer’s benefits include the following: DB Best Operational Data Management services helped streamline and standardize customer’s DBA tasks by addressing a variety of topics proactively to optimize the existing operational data management, making it more secure and efficient. In addition, we significantly reduced the number and complexity of open issues and tickets. This resulted in delivering greater service availability, compliance, and security for customer’s databases and applications.
Our ODM team took away from the customer’s team all the issues related to the database performance, so their developers can now focus on new business solutions and other important stuff. We can do the same trick for your business, so, contact us to streamline your database support and maintenance. Help your DBAs to sleep better at night by hiring our 24×7 support team and get to the next level of database reliability by bringing our top experts into the game.
