Fidelity Information Services (FIS) is one of the world’s top-ranked technology providers to the banking industry. With more than 33,000 experts in 100 countries, FIS is part of the S&P 500. FIS has also been named the number one overall financial technology provider in the world by American Banker and Financial Insights (FinTech 100).

Business Challenge
FIS was running on one of the most complex replicated environments we had ever seen.  Microsoft’s premier support couldn’t help because the environment was running on SQL2000, which was no longer supported.  SQLHA was brought in to take over project management and lead technical activity over all internal DBA staff and other external consultants.

• Consistent outages jeopardized credit card purchases and affected ability to report on credit card revenue
• Extremely diverse and complex environment running on a non-supported version of SQL Server
• Upgrade needed to be performed within 2.5 months to meet business timeline

Engagement Summary
SQLHA coordinated several resources and led an intense 2.5 month project that saw massive concurrent upgrades and support efforts.  We teamed with Microsoft Consulting Services to validate builds for OS, SAN and SQL Servers while ensuring no end users were affected by the upgrade.

• SQL Server UpgradeHardware UpgradeChange the Replication from 2 way to 3 way across the country
• 1-for-1 upgrade, added a vertical tier for environment moving data bi-directionally across the country 24×7
• Design the base builds for the OS, SAN and SQL Servers
• Simultaneously support production
• Develop plan for upgrading the 2 current bi-directional replicated environments and adding a new replication direction to make it a 3 way replication environment
• Tune the replicated environment for cross-country traffic and core transactional performance
• Project Management:  2 months to plan, design, implement and performance test the environment before Black Friday

Results
The project finished successfully ahead of deadline and the business was able to function appropriately during its busiest season.  The new environment performed at a higher level on less resources, creating a far more efficient and usable environment.

• New environment is highly available, more resilient
• Performance tuning exercises reduced response time and increased peak capacity
• Performance improvements reduced the core TPS by 500% while exceeding the previous year’s load by 100%.
• Replicated environment eliminated high latency or transaction times that were experienced previously
• SQL Servers replicating bi-directionally across the country, receiving financial transactions for credit card and pre-paid card applications
• 100% of the upgrades were done 2 weeks before Black Friday

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) is one of the oldest financial institutions in the United States. With a history dating back over 200 years.  JPMC is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.2 trillion, operating in more than 60 countries with more than 240,000 employees.  JPMorgan Chase serves millions of consumers, small businesses and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients.

Business Challenge
JPMorgan Chase chose SQLHA for two high-profile projects intended to reduce licensing, hardware and physical footprints while increasing system performance and agility.  The first project entailed designing a SQL-as-a-Service architecture to support over 5,000 instances.  The second was a migration of over 5,000 branch locations from DB2 to SQL Server.

• Reduce physical infrastructure footprint while improving performance, scalability and reliability
• High risk- new system would change the experience and approach for the typical application that is hosted on SQL Server
• Potentially manage 5-6000 SQL servers factoring in all lifecycle management factors including security, scalability, HA, DR, monitoring, auditing and daily maintenance
• Produce brand new instances within a 24 hour turnaround time
• Develop process that would allow migration from DB2 to SQL at all branch locations
• Develop a utility that would be able to migration the financial data from DB2 to SQL Server and do this for up to 1,500 branch locations across the country in a 2 hour period
• No downtime allowed during migration- if any/all branches were down, customers would be unable to perform any banking operations at the local branches

Engagement Summary
Working with JPMC’s DB engineering team to design a SQLaaS environment, SQLHA identified the core configurations for the physical environment and designed the operational and management offerings for the environment.  This took into account security, auditing, compliance, backup strategy, HA, DR, monitoring, performance tuning and provisioning of the server itself.  Lastly, we developed a groundbreaking migration utility that migrated 1500/branches a night, all in a 2-hour period, running 600 concurrent conversions across the WAN.

• Identified the core configurations for the physical environment, designed test cases to perform against 3 vendors hardware platforms to determine the optimal configuration and hardware solution for the future state environment
• Conducted comparison by running TPCC, TPCH and batch tests across 16 VMs that were hosted on the different hardware platforms while capturing and analyzing all of the test results
• Developed a utility that would be able to migration the financial data from DB2 to SQL Server and do this for up to 1,500 branch locations across the country in a 2 hour period
• Each migration had to verify and validate the data was successfully migrated 100% since this was critical financial data
• Process had to be designed to take into account the network limitations, the limited functionality in SQL Server Express, ability to manage the processes for start, stop, rollback and failover scenarios, massively parallel and perform the migration in under 2 hours
• Process was designed using SQL Server Integration Services and allowed a single branch to be fully pre-checked, migrated and validated in an average of 10 minutes

Results
JPMC was able to meet business requirements around footprint reduction and efficiency while completing a successful migration.

• Reduce license, hardware cost
• Reduced physical server footprint by 1200%
• New virtualized base image configured to produce brand new instances within a 24 hour turnaround time
• Migration completed within timelines without end user pain

The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $131 billion in total assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial.

Business Challenge
Allstate wanted cost flexibility around licensing and physical hardware.  They also wanted to evaluate overall power use and consumption for IT infrastructure as part of a companywide environmental awareness effort.  A critical aspect of this challenge was adding Disaster Recovery sites while achieving the directive of a smaller, more efficient footprint.

• Over 1000 servers and several thousand databases and hundreds of TB of storage
• Large project that affected over 15,000 internal applications
• High risk because of the complexity of the applications using the SQL Server environment
• Update architecture to support a consolidated platform

Engagement Summary
Allstate charged SQLHA with technical project leadership, responsible for designing the future state architecture, managing the internal SQL Server team and  designing an approach and process to upgrade and consolidate the databases at the same time.

• Upgraded all of the SQL Servers to SQL 2005 from several other versions and updated the physical architecture to support a consolidated SQL Server environment
• Designed a utility to scan the network and retrieve metadata about each SQL Server host
• Developed a migration utility that migrated the database and all the related objects from one server, enabling scheduling and reducing the time to configure for each database

Results
Allstate was able to upgrade their system, save money, increase efficiency and reduce their overall IT footprint, meeting requirements for an environmentally-aware infrastructure.

• SQLHA reduced overall server footprint by 65%
• Standardized hardware, assisted in launching green datacenter
• Physical patching/maintenance process enabled better service out to lines of business
• Increased resiliency of applications with new Disaster Recovery plan
• Designed future-state  architecture, working with business on potential future service offerings and their impact on infrastructure and performance
• Enabled technology initiatives to be updated to meet best practices and support massive global business demands