Tech Stack: Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Factory, Azure VMs, Azure Copy, Azure SQL PaaS

About the Client

Our client is a leading U.S. based manufacturing firm that was growing its IT operating costs tied to legacy data management and business intelligence infrastructure. This client had invested in well-established, yet partially depreciating data centers and equipment. The company needed a solution that could bring down their total cost of ownership.

Background

Our client noticed a sharp increase in their server traffic and high latency due to increase in number of concurrent users. Although the existing server infrastructure was recently upgraded to a series of 128GB RAM servers, the client felt the need for an upgrade that considered the concerns of scalability and cost.

The firm’s hardware utilization rates were significantly low (about 20 percent) as they required high capacity to handle demand only during peak time and remained under-utilized otherwise. As a result, like other enterprises, the client had to spend much more on compute and storage than required.

Additionally, the licensing costs of platforms like Oracle and Informatica added to the overhead expenditure. The client needed a flexible, scalable, and reliable BI server infrastructure solution.

Our Approach

Infrastructure maintenance is often expensive. As the data center grows, so does the cost of infrastructure, IT support, and server licensing. Comparatively, cloud is more economical than traditional on-premises services.

AArete started by rebuilding our client’s on-premises BI infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. As a part of our platform architecture, we provided a holistic set of cloud advisory, transformational and managed services to the client.

The cloud provides the ability to dynamically scale your infrastructure using nearly unlimited resources on an on-demand basis. This enables the client fo scale from 20 to 100 percent utilization of their given capacity, thereby providing a significant cost advantage. Additionally, the instant scale-out capability offers even greater value by allowing the client to solve business problems without the delay associated with the traditional software/hardware procurement and installation process.

Additionally, we recommended that the client migrate to Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Factory. By leveraging Azure PaaS capabilities, we ensured low capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX).

During the initial cloud assessment and planning phase, we highlighted that the total cost of ownership was high with current server infrastructure mainly due to large servers and hidden operational costs like maintenance and downtime, disaster recovery, support, and other factors.

AArete made architectural changes to address the reliability, scalability, and data availability concerns. Additionally, we ensured that the data and processes were compliant with regulations.

In order to achieve this, we performed the following activities:

• Created Azure environment including setting up multiple lighter clustered Azure VMs for DB, BI-App and BI-Web server
• Cloud Data Migration using Azure Copy
• Migration of database and ETL to Azure SQL Database and Azure Data Factory under Azure SQL PaaS along with other software for BI cost and maintenance optimization
• Integrated BI Application and Network

The Result

The client managed to reduce their monthly IT expenses significantly. Additionally, our solution offered several other benefits such as

• Optimum utilization of IT infrastructure along with easy scalability to support business agility
• VMs were configured and scheduled independently
• Easy to restore backups with impact isolated to specific VMs
• Security and privacy guaranteed by Microsoft
• Backup and Disaster Recovery