Torbay Council SQL Server Upgrade and
SQL Server Managed Service Case Study

Initially, Torbay Council approached DSP due to their ageing SQL Server Estate, with a requirement to upgrade their existing SQL Cluster from SQL 2012 to SQL 2019. Operating with an ageing SQL Server estate can present many challenges. Performance can suffer as the ageing environment can struggle to handle increased workloads and growing data volumes. Security risks also increase as ageing versions are more likely to have unpatched vulnerabilities/no longer receive support or security fixes from Microsoft, leaving the estate susceptible to security breaches. Finally, by operating on an ageing estate you can only operate with a limited set of features, the features in SQL 2019 can enhance performance, provide better security, improve manageability and enable advanced analytics.

Secondly, Torbay Council were also suffering from a DBA recruitment issue. Due to the spike of remote DBA jobs during the pandemic, Torbay Council, along with many other public sector organisations were finding themselves getting priced out of recruiting a high enough quality DBA. 

SQL Server 2012 Upgrade

A discovery exercise was performed, and DSP found 16 SQL instances with a total of 299 databases which were in scope for this project. DSP documented the current environment's resource utilisation over time, enabling us to advise Torbay Council of the exact resources required for the new environment.

DSP documented and presented three possible environment designs, using a variety of high-availability solutions. After a series of workshops, it was agreed that the new environment would utilise SQL Server Availably Groups for high availability. 
As this was a large project, a dedicated DSP Project Manager was assigned. This ensured a project plan was in place, regular meetings took place, and all stakeholders were kept up to date with the next steps and the progress to date.

The migrations were carried out in three phases. DSP built 3 clusters with a total of 33 instances to achieve high availability for all databases. We then performed a test migration of all 299 databases to their retrospective instance. This allowed Torbay to perform full functional testing of all applications before committing to the live migration.

Once testing was signed off, the live migrations were performed in a manner which had minimal service downtime and minimal impact on the business.

SQL Server Managed Service

Following the successful upgrade to SQL Server 2019, we then complimented that service with an ongoing managed service. The managed service has allowed Torbay to solve their recruitment headache as they now have access to an elite group of DBAs 24/7/365 at a fraction of the cost of hiring one internally.

DSP are now the first line of defence when it comes to supporting Torbay’s systems and are seen as an extension of the internal Torbay IT team. We actively help ‘keep the lights on’ which allows internal resources to focus on innovation and other business critical requirements.

When setting up the SQL Server Managed Service, DSP’s dedicated customer success team was used to ensure the service was truly tailored to Torbay’s bespoke requirements so everyone was clear on responsibilities.