In an era marked by digital growth and expansion, businesses need to have efficient and secure data management systems in place to handle the increasing volume and complexity of information.
This case study demonstrates our team’s proficient work in aiding a rapidly growing firm with its tech-related challenges. Our experts provided tailored solutions, ensuring robust data security, optimizing system performance, and streamlining operations. By integrating innovative technologies and best practices, we helped the firm navigate its growth trajectory seamlessly, ultimately enhancing their overall productivity and competitive edge.
Background
As the firm grew and acquired more businesses, the complexity of their operations increased. This highlighted the need for a comprehensive data management solution to manage their expanding data and ensure seamless integration across all units. We worked with their team to develop and implement a custom solution that supported their growth and improved efficiency.
Challenges
An integral component of their organization, the database server, which stored high-sensitivity information such as customer details and financial data, kept losing its storage connection. This persistent issue resulted in backend system outages at peak times posing a significant predicament for the IT team.
The solution required meticulous health monitoring scripts to diagnose the underlying connectivity issues in a complicated cloud environment configuration.
However, solving this problem uncovered another issue: a query on their server took an unreasonably long time to run, sometimes causing the server to timeout. This was the result of old code that had not been designed to scale to the size of the newly merged businesses. This small piece of technical debt was rapidly proving to be very costly. The average cost of IT downtime is approximately $5,600 per minute.
Our team radically overhauled the code, optimizing it and implementing more robust solutions to ensure the server’s scalability and efficiency. The entire ordeal highlighted the importance of proactive monitoring and scalable code in maintaining the integrity and performance of critical infrastructure.
Methodology
Our team, of database experts and analysts, commenced work on their data storage troubles. We diagnosed issues with the database server connection and addressed the query running problem.
We found that the loss of server connection to its storage was due to the storage devices getting backed up/overloaded due to malware and antivirus, as the database storage files were not excluded from their scope. Adding the database files to the exclusion lists resolved the issue. Although this seems like a simple solution, it wasn’t at all an obvious problem to solve. To address the problem of the slow query, we did deep SQL analysis and storage reviews and redesigned the code to function extremely efficiently, along with adding indexes to avoid full-text table scans on multiple trillion-row tables.
Conclusion
The result was a task that previously took 30 minutes using 26G of memory was optimized to run in just 150 milliseconds using only 1G of RAM. This remarkable improvement not only boosted server performance significantly but also enabled them to downsize the server infrastructure.
Consequently, they saved a staggering $20,000 per month, substantially reducing operational costs. Additionally, this optimization alleviated a small portion of their technical debt and created a smaller, streamlined, and efficient system.
By proactively addressing these performance issues, we saved them considerable money from outages and hosting charges preparing them for future growth. This forward-thinking approach has positioned them better to handle increasing workloads and adapt to evolving demands. The enhanced efficiency and reduced costs have given them a competitive edge, ensuring they are well-equipped for sustained success in the long term.
