Case Study: High Level Assessment For Supply Chain It Logistics Solutions

Problem

A global organization providing supply chain IT solutions in the logistics industry relies heavily on its high performing databases to manage data from across the globe. Following a change in management, the new leadership wanted a clear picture of the organization’s database environment, how it was performing, and when certain upgrades would need to be made.

Solution

Although no major performance issues were reported with its databases, the organization’s leadership knew their databases were mission critical for maintaining the flow of business. For this reason, Solvaria’s team of senior DBAs determined a high-level assessment of the global organization’s production server would offer the best visual of their environment’s current situation. The assessment analyzed SQL Server performance, stability of existing SQL Server in terms of builds, database maintenance, high availability and disaster recovery, and Windows performance as it related to SQL Server.

This assessment included reviewing the current physical database implementation, monitoring relevant performance metrics, and identifying potential issues that could impact that performance. Once these issues were uncovered, our team would then have the information needed to develop a long-lasting database strategy that could support future growth and changes in technology.

Results

Using a utility developed by Solvaria, our DBAs spent a week gathering statistics on performance and gathering queries, ultimately uncovering potential future threats and instabilities across the environment. Our recommendations included implementing more regular database maintenance tasks across all services, further investigating errors, reconfiguring TempDB, further investigation into root causes of blocking, upgrading SQL Servers to the latest service packs, and upgrading to the latest Windows Server service pack.

Following the assessment, the organization chose to implement our team of senior SQL Server DBAs to uphold best practices for maintaining the health of their databases.