Reference Case: AS Adventure – An SQL server cluster solution

The customer’s challenge

Stijn De Coen, Group IT Manager SysOps at AS Adventure: 'Around ten years ago, our main database servers were running on the precursors of NVMe technology. We used this to improve the performance of our storage, but the problem was that the technology was only available for one server. This meant that there was only one server to run all data, which was obviously too big of a risk. If we lost one server, the whole organisation would have come to a standstill. Later on, when NVMe technology was starting to gain ground, we felt that it was time for a change, so we reached out to Bechtle.'
 

Bechtle’s solution

Arne Ruttens, Account Manager at Bechtle: 'From day one, we approached the challenge from a practical perspective. We looked at both the customer’s requirements for the new solution as well as their current environment. We found that a considerable part of their existing cluster could still be used, without any loss of performance for the perfect optimisation of both systems. This served as the starting point for the project.'

Wesley Wienen, Data Centre Consultant at Bechtle: 'Arne involved me right at the beginning of the project. After talking to the customer, we quickly realised that their data centre needed to run faster and the risk of data or productivity loss needed to be drastically reduced. We then set to work to determine which technology would be the best solution for them.
 

AS Adventure has a critical, highly transactional database for important matters such as cash transactions. The centralised database is made available to all international entities. For this solution, we conducted a market study which showed that vSAN was ideally suited to redundant NVMe drives in their VMWare environment. vSAN turns NVMe drives in servers into one large storage pool. The small pieces of data are written everywhere in parallel with a granular fault tolerance. There is also high availability thanks to VMWare vSAN to optimise the uptime of the cluster.

At Bechtle, we collaborated with HPE on this solution. We gave the customer the opportunity to test everything before making a decision by means of a Proof of Concept. In the end, the customer chose this solution and we were able to start the rollout."

Advantages of the solution

Stijn De Coen: 'The organisation is now running on the new solution. One of the biggest advantages so far is the extremely fast storage, which is a huge difference from what we had previously. The solution is also very scalable; by using virtualisation we can easily scale up when needed. We are now also running on multiple servers, which significantly increases redundancy.'

Relationship with Bechtle

Stijn De Coen: 'We chose Bechtle to help us with this project because we have already been cooperating with them for more than eight years. We have always been satisfied with their projects, so it was an obvious decision to approach them for this project as well. After the proof of concept, it quickly became clear that Bechtle was the best partner for this solution.'