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Earlier this year, a customer had an issue with an on-premises server that had become unreliable and was threatening daily business activities. Discussions had already come up about moving the environment to Microsoft Azure long-term. With the issues on the server becoming more critical, the timeline was escalated.
The move would require careful planning to migrate the applications and databases from the on-premise servers to the Azure cloud. Many Azure options were considered before choosing two Virtual Machines which met the application requirements. As the move was being planned, it was clear that the databases which were on a SQL Server that was badly out of date would need to be upgraded to the latest version of SQL Server. This would be just one of many challenges faced to complete this migration. To reduce downtime and increase accuracy, a fully functioning mirror of the application was setup a week ahead of time. Our team’s familiarity with Azure combined with the speed in which Azure services can be deployed, allowed the mirror site to be up and running and fully secured to Microsoft Azure’s security recommendations in a few days. In the following days, the customer’s team was able to test and verify the environment’s feasibility, check for setup issues, and stress test for performance.
During the setup of the mirror site, an expected problem was confirmed, the downtime required to move the larger databases would be considerable. This application was critical to the customer’s business. To reduce time offline, our Westmoreland Software team planned to take full backups of the databases ahead of time and transfer them to the new Azure environment. Once the application was offline, a smaller differential would be completed and transferred.
Azure Hybrid Benefit was utilized to save the customer on the Microsoft VM licenses. Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring your own Windows Server, SQL Server and other eligible Microsoft License as a cost-saving benefit as long as there is an active software assurance agreement.
Another easy way to save money hosting on Microsoft Azure it to purchase reservations. Each VM was eligible for one or three year reservations, where committing to buy ahead provides a significant savings. The project was successfully completed from planning to implementation in 10 days. If you would like to explore options moving your application to the cloud, please call 724-755-3080. View more about Systems Integrations
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