The case study below was submitted by Harry Harrison — Program Manager, Software Services — from the California Educational Computer Consortium.
Please briefly describe what CECC does:
The California Educational Computer Consortium (CECC) is a nonprofit organization that develops and supports COMPASSedu, an ERP system used by school districts and county offices of education across California.
Brief description of your SQL Server environment:
We operate a primary data center in San Bernardino, California, with a disaster recovery (DR) site in Victorville, approximately 40 miles away. Our environment supports production, development, and test workloads for CECC members. Our largest SQL Server instance runs on a 128-core server with 4 TB of memory, hosting approximately 160 databases totaling 8 TB of data.
Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for you.
We were relying on VM snapshots for disaster recovery and wanted to transition to a more robust, real-time high availability solution using SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG). We engaged SQL Solutions Group to help design and implement this architecture due to our limited in-house experience with AGs.
What are the outcomes of this work?
We successfully implemented Availability Groups across our environments, starting with development and progressing to production. After validating the solution with our largest member (San Bernardino County), we expanded the deployment to all remaining production SQL Server instances. This resulted in a standardized, highly available architecture across our organization, and minimized the need to have services offline for members during maintenance periods.
How did the project help you be more competitive and/or productive?
After completing the project, we needed to refresh hardware at our primary data center. With the cluster and Availability Groups in place, we were able to migrate to new infrastructure in minutes, rather than requiring a full weekend and significant downtime. This dramatically reduced operational risk and improved service availability.
What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group?
The ROI has been substantial in both risk reduction and operational efficiency. We’ve minimized downtime, simplified maintenance, and gained the ability to perform infrastructure upgrades with little to no user impact—capabilities that were not possible in our previous environment.
What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
SQL Solutions Group is an extremely professional and knowledgeable team. They were patient and thorough throughout the entire process, ensuring we were comfortable with each step before moving forward. By the time we reached production, we had full confidence in the solution.
Their global team made it easy to coordinate after-hours work, which was critical for tasks requiring downtime. They have also been highly responsive when we’ve encountered network-related challenges affecting Availability Groups.
While we don’t often engage consultants, this project was a great investment and money well spent. We would confidently recommend SQL Solutions Group to any organization needing their expertise.
