Case Study: Upgrade Optimization For Pediatric Care Center

Organization Description

This nationally recognized organization honors a mission that goes back more than a century: to bring health and well-being to all children. Their mission is the core reason they are now recognized as the premier pediatric care center in the Washington, DC area, and have seen more than 219,000 children from DC, Virginia and Maryland as well as from across the country and around the world in just the past year.

Problem

Despite having a full staff of dedicated DBAs, a pediatric care center was in need of a better visualization for their database environment as they prepared for an upgrade. Their current staff was unable to handle the additional support the organization needed, including determining which systems would be ready for an upgrade and taking inventory of their machines to ensure they had adequate hardware.  IT leaders at the organization realized they did not have enough staff to be able to perform an upgrade of that magnitude and reached out to Solvaria for supplemental support.  We partnered with Microsoft and a regional infrastructure provider to ensure that the databases, software, and infrastructure were properly classified and evaluated.

“Their current staff was unable to handle the additional support the organization needed, including determining which systems would be ready for an upgrade and taking inventory of their machines to ensure they had adequate hardware”

Solution

Solvaria captured the necessary data from the organization’s 20 servers and 75 instances using a combination of automated scripts and manual query execution. Our senior DBAs integrated directly with the organization’s current team to gather the information needed for the upgrade and provide recommendations on which servers could be upgraded and which needed more hardware. Solvaria and Microsoft created a set of best practices and recommendations that laid out a road map detailing:

• Upgrade schedules
• Enhancements needed
• Recommended tuning

Results

By following these standards and guidelines, the organization was able to achieve a more optimized SQL server environment with improved performance, security, and stability.

Our senior DBAs created a document that guided the organization through all areas of the SQL Server environment that needed improvement or could benefit from applying best practices and recommendations. Then, a full diagnostic of the current organization’s systems was provided.  Finally, the Solvaria team provided recommendations for a New Enterprise Architecture and configuration to leverage Microsoft SQL server 2012 for future performance, capacity, and planning.

Both the client and Solvaria agreed the project ran smoothly due to Solvaria’s expertise in both Oracle and SQL Server, and stayed on track thanks to our DBAs senior-level management skills.