Imagination moves their global finance system to a hybrid solution
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- App Innovation
- Design & Media
About Imagination
Imagination is an international independent, creative communications agency that sets out to transform business through creativity and to build relationships between people and brands, products and services. With clients such as Rolls-Royce, Harvey Nichols, Elemis and Jaguar Land Rover they are an award winning agency ranking at number one in Design Week magazine’s Top 100 for the 12 consecutive years.
The challenge
Imagination’s London office had been using on-premises SQL Server Virtual Machines (VMs) for their Global Finance System. This on-premises setup had two main issues:
- Most of the users were accessing the system from the USA and the extra network latency caused by having the system hosted in London thousands of miles away was causing performance issues.
- There was no satisfactory Disaster Recovery (DR) facility.
The solution
As a forward-thinking company, Imagination recognises that technology is a key component in their success and so they decided to move their Global Finance System from SQL Server on-premises to a hybrid solution. The live servers would be hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud in the US to minimize network latency and replicas of the databases would be kept up to date on-premises in London for DR. Imagination reached out to Transparity to design and deploy the system and migrate the data.
Working alongside Imagination, Transparity consultants set-up the primary server in Azure, with SQL Server 2008 R2 installed, and then migrated the on-premises databases to it. Then SQL Server log shipping was configured to the on-premises database servers for DR.
With the migration to the cloud environment complete, Transparity confirmed the server configuration, and fully tested the DR process. Additionally SQL Server performance was tested by gathering traces and metrics of commands and queries issued on the existing live server and comparing these with the new Azure server.
The support hours began on go-live of the system with hours purchased on account and called off as they are used. The support is flexible and uncomplicated, being used for fixes, as well as updates, routine maintenance and system health checks.
The outcome
“Moving our Global ERP System from an on-premises solution to a Cloud hybrid solution presented some technical challenges during design and implementation phases. Transparity consultants provided the skills and expertise needed to successfully complete the project. We are extremely happy with the end result and the service provided by Transparity.”