The Challenge
EDM’s growth made it clear that it needed to redevelop its core systems, and as such they needed a technology solution and partner to support them in providing:
- High–Availability for its customer facing and critical back office operations.
- Proactive 24/7/365 systems management and critical support.
- Reconciliation between the central database and separately hosted website databases.
- Future-proof scalability.
Microsoft SQL Server proved the outstanding technical choice based on existing in-house skills, technical capability and low cost of ownership. With the technology decision made, Microsoft introduced DSP as their partner of choice to implement and support the solution.
The Solution
DSP fitted easily into the IT team in a partnership which continues to work well. EDM are impressed by DSP’s knowledge of SQL Server, but also by our understanding of the business processes, drivers and proactive approach to problem solving.
“As the relationship matured it was clear that one skill enabled the other”: Steve Clay, Head of IT Infrastructure said of DSP, “For technical expertise I can’t fault them. Excellent.”
To achieve the high-availability required, the solution used Windows failover clustering, replication to scale-out the business to encompass EDM’s custom applications, and Transparent Database Encryption (TDE) to encrypt the database for security compliance. This delivered a resilient system with reduced application downtime, increased scalability and performance, enhanced application programmability, and tightened security controls.
The Result
With its new system in place for a year, EDM has seen efficiencies across the board. Not only has it achieved its business objectives and seen an increase in customers, but its ongoing support relationship with DSP has paid dividends.
With a faster diagnosis and resolution of performance related problems, high-availability of the core databases and a scalable solution that can support a fast-growing business, EDM made the right technology choice, the right partner choice and has a system in place that its brand relies on!
