Big Four Accounting Firm

Market Segment: Financial

Introduction

The Company is one of the world's largest accounting firms. The accountancy has some 770 offices in 149 countries around the world, providing clients with services in three lines of business: Assurance (including financial and regulatory reporting), Tax and Advisory. The umbrella entity is one of accounting's Big Four.

Problem/Opportunity

The Company had undertaken the challenging goal of consolidating its many servers to fewer, more powerful servers, thus potentially reaping tremendous savings in administrative overhead, hardware, and resource costs. This was a significant shift from a scale-out (more servers) approach to a scale-up (fewer, more powerful, scalable servers) approach. Scalability Experts (SE) was brought in to plan, analyze, and formulate a specific consolidation recommendation for their server environment. The purpose of this consolidation project was to provide better manageability through the effective consolidation of 43 SQL Servers.

Solution/Capabilities

Based on the information gathered during the onsite analysis, SE found that many of the servers had the specific characteristics that made them suitable for consolidation. It was found that the entire array of processors in the SQL Server environment was not being taxed heavily. Approximately a third of the servers demonstrated signs of memory pressure largely because the Company had made only a limited allotment of memory available to SQL Servers, using the min and max server memory options. The most prevalent pain point across approximately 10% of the servers was found to be disk contention. SE proposed two server options for consolidation. The plan that was implemented consolidated the 43 server environment down to one high-end 64-bit server (two servers for failover clustering). A breakdown of how the databases would be placed within each server/instance was provided as part the final report. SE also provided recommendations on best practice configurations for SQL Server related to Database file layout, RAID configurations and server settings. Results reduced the company’s footprint/energy consumption, increased performance and lowered overall TCO.

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