An Independent Software Vendor Embraces the Cloud for Community-driven Data Analytics

Industry: Software Development

VIA Consulting, an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), implemented an online platform (SynergyScape) to help communities collaborate and learn together. Prologika helped VIA to scale the platform on Microsoft Azure, and to implement cloud-hosted data analytics.

Business Needs

For VIA, deploying their SynergyScape online platform to the cloud was a no-brainer. The alternative was to make a significant investment in creating and maintaining an on-premises infrastructure. VIA selected Microsoft Azure because of its breath of features and flexible pricing. VIA distributed its platform on multiple Azure virtual machines.

However, as VIA quickly realized, outsourcing the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure was one thing but scaling to thousands of users was quite another.It’s easy to spin off a new Azure virtual machine, but expert help is required to make sure the performance of the cloud-hosted infrastructure meet service level agreements. VIA engaged Prologika to assess their platform and to ensure that can meet the expected OLTP and OLAP data volumes.

Solution

As a first step, Prologika assessed the existing SQL Server deployment and presented its findings and recommendations to the VIA management. Using Visual Studio Online, Prologika conducted load tests to determine the system capacity. Prologika made changes to the OLTP database to make it more scalable. By taking advantage of the innovative Windows Server storage pools, Prologika increased the system capacity by pooling multiple data disks and distributing the OLTP load across multiple data drives.To make the system highly-available, as required by Microsoft to be covered by the Azure service level agreement, Prologika implemented database mirroring so that the primary database fails over to a mirrored server.

With help from Prologika, VIA implemented a data warehouse database on hosted it on another Azure Virtual Machine. Prologika optimized the data warehouse database for analytical loads. As a next step, a hybrid architecture consisting of Analysis Services Tabular model and Power BI was implemented, to empower VIA’s users with interactive data insights.

Benefits

Prologika helped VIA to scale its OLTP and OLAP infrastructure to thousands of users.

Scaling OLTP databases

Because the SynergyScape platform is community driven, sudden capacity increases are common. For example, a celebrity might host a TV interview and encourage his followers to sign it to the SynergyScape platform. This might result in tens to hundreds concurrent OLTP requests. Powered by SQL Server, the VIA’s OLTP database can scale to accommodate such spikes.

Customer satisfaction

Data analytics is the most valued feature of the SynergyScape platform. Previously, VIA used another vendor’s tool for delivering standard reports. However, the reports had performance issues and were lacking in interactive features. By switching to Power BI, VIA delivers interactive and insightful reports to its customers.

With a few clicks, users can create interactive reports to analyze their community data and slice and dice it in different ways. The in-memory model centralizes business logic and metrics and promotes interactive analytics. Data-level model security ensures that users can access only their data.