Global Investment Firm
Migration from Sybase to SQL Server 2008
Market Segment: Hedge Fund Company
Introduction
This company is a global investment and technology development firm with more than 1,300 employees; approximately $19 billion in investment capital as of January 1, 2011; and offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Since its organization in 1988, the firm has earned an international reputation for financial innovation, technological leadership, and an extraordinarily distinguished staff.
Poor Performance and Scalability: When the company, one of the largest hedge fund companies in the world, started to experience poor transaction data performance, mission-critical availability issues and concerns with scalability, they called on Scalability Experts (SE) to assess their environment, design a new architecture and migrate their operations to a higher performing platform.
Heterogeneous Environment: The company had an inefficient heterogeneous environment (mixed bag) that included large Sybase databases running on Solaris and SQL 2005 running on HP servers that were underperforming. They also had multiple and different SLA’s to contend with that made their environment costly to manage and maintain. To eliminate issues of complexity, costs and performance SE recommended standardizing on Microsoft’s SQL 2008 Enterprise platform. SE also recommended a unique three tired reference architecture approach that provided a framework to cost effectively match up the criticality of the databases in order to not over engineer the support costs for lower priority applications.
Problem/Opportunity
Their environment was running SQL Server 2005 on HP DL 380s. They had 43 SQL server 2005 instances across 23 physical servers utilizing approximately 12 TB. There were more than 610 production databases and another 100 Sybase production databases. The Sybase environment had 9 instances consuming 20TB. The scope of this effort focused on the 13 MS SQL databases, spread over 2 SQL 2005 data servers plus 1 SQL 2005 Cluster, and 8 Sybase databases on a single data server.
SE Completed a Three Phased Approach to Migrate and Standardize the Environment
Scalability Experts completed a three phased approach to determine needed design and platform changes. SE completed the following activities:
Phase I: (Performance Data Collection and Analysis)
- Collected performance data on selected back office SQL servers: included OS performance data related to server memory and processor utilization, I/O workload, SQL Server workload and meta data
- Analyzed data for Tier one and Tier two servers
- Developed reference architecture and hardware recommendations
- Recommended need to upgrade to SQL Server 2008
Phase II: (Design and Reference Architecture)
- Defined reference architecture tiers (based on need for availability, security, performance, scalability, reporting, storage and monitoring)
- Developed an “operational framework” with regard to upgrading to SQL Server 2008, features of SQL Server 2008 and integration of Sybase workload
- Provided database Change Management framework
- Provide HA/DR solutions
- Include Read-Only replicas for workload segregation
Phase III (Migration and Implementation)
- Implemented new three-tiered reference architecture
- Migrated applications to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition
- Trained the team on MS SQL Server and Monitoring Administration
- Trained the team on extending and administering the solution
- Replicated Sybase databases on MS SQL Server 2008 including benchmarking the performance numbers before and after replication and profile the impact with various workloads.
- Full standardization of database operations and platform
Solution/Capabilities
SE implemented a high performing homogeneous computing environment by re-architecting and standardizing the company on Microsoft’s SQL 2088 Enterprise platform. The company has benefited by:
- Cost avoidance: Using SE’s three tiered reference architecture and framework has maximized performance and availability while at the same time reduced infrastructure costs. Standardizing on the Microsoft platform has lowered management and maintenance costs.
- Improved application manageability: Migrating to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has reduced the complexity of their environment and created a more stable and responsive computing environment. It has also allowed them to maximize the use of internal resources.
- Increased Performance: Response time is up, throughput is faster and the company has benefited from a homogeneous environment that has driven higher levels of productivity. Their systems are more available, scalable and performing at higher levels of efficiency.
The migration and platform standardization work completed by Scalability Experts was viewed by the company as very critical to their mission-critical applications and the performance of their overall financial transaction business. SE after every engagement surveys their customers to gain important customer satisfaction feedback on the quality of their services. Multiple questions are asked related to the quality of our consultants, architects, deliverables, final results and other elements of the project. On a five point scale, this company rated SE’s overall quality of work at the highest level of 5.0.
SE resources
Migrating from Oracle to SQL Server?
Learn more about Scalability Experts'
worldwide training 
Headed into the cloud?
Learn more about Scalability Experts'
cloud computing services
Extend your SQL Server 2008 Management Data Warehouse (MDW) with Scalability Experts Smart™ 
