Headquartered in the USA, this global leader provides the tools and innovative engineering solutions that their customers trust to get the job done. With 100+ manufacturing facilities and a global footprint spanning 60 countries, they employ over 60,000 employees and generate revenues in excess of $14.5 billion.
The customer's challenge was finding an effective way to manage their disaster recovery for a legacy application. Moving to Enterprise Edition and Availability Groups would entail a 4x license uplift cost, as well as significant migration complexity. The customer, therefore, looked for viable alternatives.
The affected architecture was a single SQL Server Instance containing three databases that were very active and business-critical. Their legacy solution utilized Log Shipping to a remote standby site every fifteen minutes to meet their business continuity requirements.
The underlying Log Shipping architecture was liked, but long-term management was problematic for their DBAs. As is typical for Log Shipping environments, the solution had to be frequently manually updated, with confusion existing as to the current state of database replication. As a result, whenever issues occurred - either during planned routine maintenance or in emergency situations - the DBA team often found it more expedient to rebuild the entire Log Shipping solution from scratch, rather than fix the existing disaster recovery configuration. This was of course a significant waste of time and a source of much frustration for the team.