Johannesburg, 22 Oct 2018
PG Bison, South Africa's leading manufacturer and primary upgrader of timber-related products, is a longstanding EOH client; in fact, EOH's first ever.
In 2015, the company set about replacing an outdated ERP version with the latest upgrade. As part of this change, PG Bison decided to move to a Microsoft SQL environment, which was to become the standard for its IT architecture.
However, on go-live of the main ERP upgrade milestone, the company discovered performance problems with the new environment, and began to experience frequent SQL downtime and instability.
"We needed MS SQL DBA specialists."
EOH's game plan was to discover why the environment was unstable, along with what was causing the SQL downtime and poor performance.
PG Bison's Information Services Manager, Christy De Abreu, says EOH's presentation during the proposal stage was impressive. "The team gave us such a sense of comfort. We wanted to partner with someone that we felt confident in; we didn't want to have to continue to worry about potentially having to come back to the office in the middle of the night because an application was down again. We just wanted to know for sure that it was being taken care of," says De Abreu.
EOH's approach
To address the environment instability, EOH followed its own experience, Microsoft and industry best practices specific to Microsoft SQL Server.
From a server perspective, the team split the files onto different drives to improve the ease of input/output operations. It also adjusted the power options from 'balanced' to 'high' performance.
On the SQL side, EOH optimally configured the temporary database files, the max degree of parallelism setting and the cost threshold for the parallelism setting. It put daily maintenance functions in place, which included index rebuilding or re-organising and statistics updates.
To attend to the SQL downtime, EOH implemented a backup strategy when it saw the transaction logs were running out of space. It also addressed an open transaction that was causing transaction log issues, which it escalated to the application developers. EOH was willing to work with other service providers to determine real root causes, even if they weren't necessarily SQL-related.
PG Bison's experience of EOH
PG Bison has realised substantial cost savings as a result of allowing EOH to proactively manage and enhance its Microsoft SQL Server environment. "Also, a lot of our other applications were already on Microsoft SQL Server, so now we have a standard. So when we have a developer do something for us, they can do it across the board rather than in isolation," says De Abreu.
"EOH's level of support and professionalism is a lot higher than we're used to," says Service Delivery Manager Pieter van der Merwe.
"We're now holding all our service providers to this standard," agrees De Abreu. "It makes a big difference."
During the migration process, EOH was very engaged. "They assisted in root cause analysis, engaging with other service providers. Their tools are impressive, and they engage you in the tools," says De Abreu. "They explain how they work so that we can now make informed decisions. They're much more involved than previous service providers," she adds.
EOH often brings PG Bison new enhancement opportunities: "We can upgrade more easily than we used to," says Van der Merwe. "EOH is constantly bringing us new and better ways of doing things. They're way above the minimum standard. They're awesome in that regard."
The daily reports are helping the PG Bison team, too. "Anything that went wrong or could go wrong, space issues, CPU or memory issues, any backups that didn't happen, we're being notified of and can proactively address before business reports it to us," says De Abreu.
PG Bison's Microsoft SQL Server environment has certainly been more stable. The unplanned downtime has been minimised, and the SQL environment is performing. Backups are running on schedule, with no failures.
For PG Bison, the peace of mind that comes with knowing recovery is taken care of, is priceless.
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