Manulife Financial Frees Up Substantial Resources for Innovation by Consolidating with DH2i s DxEnterprise Sustaining rapid growth with SQL Server InstanceMobility Primary Challenges Unsustainable growth of IT environment Rising maintenance costs No DR framework and inadequate HA Lack of agility to spin up new instances/dbs Tim Baker Director of Data Platform Services Environment 300+ applications 2500+ SQL Server databases 28 prod, 29 dev instances Overview Manulife Financial Corporation, a Forbes Global 500 company, is a leading international financial services group. Operating as John Hancock in the United States, and Manulife elsewhere, the company provides financial advice, insurance and wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups and institutions. The company today has an international network of more than 34,000 employees and 63,000 agents offering clients a broad range of financial protection and wealth management products and services. 1
Challenge Over the last several years, the Canadian division of Manulife was experiencing rapid growth in the number of servers and databases it needed to manage. As it supported multiple business units across all of its institutional banking, retail banking, investments, and business travel insurance, server and database sprawl was consuming increasing hardware budgets and resource time. The financial organization found itself facing an IT environment that was growing at an unsustainable rate. At first, Manulife started amalgamating databases into virtualized servers. But that didn t solve the increasing hours of maintenance that needed to be performed for the ever growing number of servers. A better solution was needed to improve system-level maintenance expenses, as well as disaster recovery readiness and overall high availability to support high business demands. We needed a solution that would roll out databases and instances without impacting the business, said Tim Baker, Director Data Platform Services, DS and DM, Manulife Financial. Our business units can t accommodate months or even weeks to build out the hardware to create a new database or instance. We needed cloudlike SQL farms that would give us the agility needed to support our shared services model. Solution To solve its infrastructure challenges Manulife built an innovative hyperconverged infrastructure which two years ago adopted DH2i s DxEnterprise high availability software to further integrate its disparate infrastructure into one cohesive utility. Using DxEnterprise, the financial services Optimized for Growth We needed cloud-like SQL farms that would give us the agility needed to support our shared services model. -Tim Baker Simplified Management Manulife has significantly lowered its storage and maintenance costs while achieving true DR and HA to meet stringent SLAs. 2
CASE STUDY organization s IT team has achieved workload and data portability, along with significantly lower storage and maintenance costs all while achieving true disaster recovery (DR) readiness and the high availability (HA) needed to meet stringent business unit service level agreements (SLAs). Manulife Headquarters, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Today, Manulife s environment has grown to over 300 applications and 2,500 production/ development SQL server databases running on just five production and five development machines. In total, they are running 29 development instances and 28 production instances in their DxEnterprise cluster. We have a five node HA DxEnterprise cluster, with huge machines and huge storage behind them, said Baker. In production we can run 85-164TB of storage of which we are using 3 Focus on Innovation To manage what is essentially a 10-node cluster takes just half of one person s time, meaning we can focus more on the business rather than expending valuable resources on maintenance. -Tim Baker
around 50TB and development has the capacity for 139-218TB of which we are currently running 100TB. However, with our hyperconverged architecture that leverages DxEnterprise we can accomplish a lot more with less storage and less maintenance time. To manage what is essentially a 10- node cluster takes just half of one person s time, meaning we can focus more on the business rather than expending valuable resources on maintenance. alternate site within 15 minutes by simply making the secondary SAN primary at the DR Site. Because no SQL restores are required, it is like failing over in an HA cluster. This effectively recovers all databases without any application changes by simply switching the SAN. All instances auto-recover on the DR hardware as soon as the SAN comes online. This recovery is done at the instance level. Simple DR Framework In the event of a disaster, Manulife s entire cluster can be recovered at their alternate site within 15 minutes by simply switching between the primary and secondary SAN. By applying structure and governance around the hyperconverged environment, Manulife has simplified instance management even further. Using the consistent application connection endpoint that DxEnterprise provides as well as unified naming and security standards ensures that if an outage happens it is completely transparent to the application and users. Using DxEnterprise, the financial services organization has complete HA between sites, so it never has to worry about DR. The entire cluster can be recovered at the If support is ever needed, DH2i has Manulife covered for that as well. DH2i support is simply awesome, said Baker. Their depth of knowledge is fantastic and they are always there when you need them to assist, guide and advise. Results By utilizing the advanced consolidation that DxEnterprise enables, Manulife has dramatically cut down on management time. Rather than expending overhead, maintenance, and system work on 100 physical servers or more - which is the footprint Baker estimates Manulife would need to support their SQL Server environment without DxEnterprise - maintenance is now only needed for a 10-node DxEnterprise cluster. This has dramatically reduced costs and management time. Using DH2i s DxEnterprise, new instances can be rolled out quickly giving Manulife cloud-like 4
agility and capacity on demand to meet business unit goals without ever fearing application downtime. In essence we have removed the word DR and replaced it with HA, said Baker. If there is an outage, the system selfrecovers and the applications don t know that a failover happened. This is due to the connection endpoint being the same. Applications don t have to make any changes, assuring that the application recovery is easy and efficient. Even if the hardware goes down, DxEnterprise seamlessly floats managed SQL Server instances to other machines. We test it annually and it works like a charm. Instance-Level Protection Manulife Real Estate Tower, Calgary, Alberta, Canadal Even if the hardware goes down, DxEnterprise seamlessly floats managed SQL Server instances to other machines. We test it annually and it works like a charm -Tim Baker 5
DxEnterprise Benefits Summary Drastically simplified cluster maintenance that requires just half of one person s time enabling a greater focus on innovation An automated disaster recovery framework that maintains a consistent app endpoint through failover A consolidated 10-node cluster that would require upwards of 100 physical servers without DxEnterprise Cloud-like agility that allows for instances to be easily rolled out without taking application downtime 6