The Chief Information Officer at the multinational fiber optics company wanted to find an outsourced SQL partner to help them grow and maintain their databases in the most optimal way.

The CIO noticed the company was ramping up its number of individual databases and buying and installing more individual business applications that required SQL Server to solve specific project needs.

“My team was comfortable putting up the environment, but we’re not DBA’s—we don’t want to be, and we don’t have time to be,” said the CIO. “So it wasn’t a talent or skillset issue for our team as much as it was a capacity and ‘focus on our core competencies’ one. As the environments naturally grew, we realized that we were going to grow past our capacity pretty quickly.”

At the same time, several solutions that had started out as not mission critical became much more vital to operations and much more visible.

“I knew that I wanted to take the time to find the best solution before we got to the point where we had to outsource,” the CIO said. “I didn’t want my network server guys getting late-night calls about logs filling up and databases going down. The vendor understands the application—my end users understand the application—but they don’t always know what was going on behind the scenes, whether it’s working optimally or not. If your company is growing rapidly like we were, you’ll end up doing late-night rescue missions if you don’t have a dedicated DBA. No one wants that.”

“It was easy to look forward and see how this could get complicated and nearly impossible to manage in short order,” the CIO said. “We were moving quickly, solving problems, setting up new environments, taking care of business—everyone was happy with the products and with our implementation, but what’s underneath might not be stable. We didn’t have a DBA to monitor everything or put the right procedures into place, so I started looking to solve a problem before it became a problem, because, at the rate we were growing, I knew it was coming.”

With the full support of the company, the CIO and his IT team began pursuing a solution to their DBA management challenge. Like every growing company, they had a choice to make. They could either hire a Database Administrator to manage the increasing number of databases, or they could partner with an outside company.

“We didn’t have the need for a full-time DBA,” said the CIO. “With one or two people in charge, there’s not enough to keep them busy—it becomes a boredom risk because they’re not being challenged enough. They’re not doing what they love and so you get the two-week surprise and start scrambling to replace that skill set and knowledge base. We wanted a solution that would be a lot more secure and reliable than that.”
This fiber optics company partnered with Kopis years ago to build and implement a Sharepoint solution as the basis for their own intranet, so they reached out again for advice and to propose a DBA solution.

“We’d had a great relationship with Kopis on the Sharepoint project, so I mentioned our DBA needs to them and they came back with an incredible custom solution for our budget, needs, and applications,” said the CIO. “The problem with a lot of DBA or other recurring service providers is that they have a set payment model. You can sign up for Plan A, Plan B, or Plan C. Well, maybe Plan C is way more than you need but Plan B isn’t quite enough? Too bad—you either have to overpay or settle for less than you need. Kopis came in with a completely custom solution that fit us perfectly—it was nothing but flexibility and a professional, partnership attitude from day one.”

Kopis began the DBA Service with a health check, reviewing all facets of every server that the company identified, taking the time to make sure that no one had accidentally omitted any recently-added servers.

The Kopis team performed a deep dive including putting Vigilix monitoring in place, and then started to systematically go through the different servers, grouping by priority.

“The Kopis team came in and needed a good baseline quickly—and I needed to know as quickly as possible what was out there, what crises I might be facing in the future,” said the CIO, “Kopis listened to us first, took the time to understand our situation, and delivered this thorough review super fast.”

After going through the servers and grouping by priority, Kopis divided the servers into groups A through D. Group D includes servers that contain test applications that are being developed as well as servers that aren’t mission critical but may need an occasional health check. Groups A through C are higher priority, production critical servers that we divided into three equal groups on a rotating schedule for manageability.

“My servers run the gamut from the company Intranet to applications that manage border crossings for raw materials to scheduling applications and applications that manage quality issues on the shop floor—we’ve got servers we can do without for a week or so and others that can’t go down for five minutes. Kopis had to go through and understand all of these different degrees of importance,” said the CIO. “The thing I appreciated the most about the partnership with Kopis was that it was never me going to them, having to ask for stuff. They came to me and said: ‘You must have environments that are of varying importance. Let’s make a plan for that.’ It’s different from any other vendor relationship I have—and it’s very refreshing to review the monthly recommendations and have a say, to choose individual line items.”

“So far, the results have been phenomenal,” the CIO said. “We’ve been in business for over 30 years and have grown exponentially, so anywhere we can reduce risk or improve efficiency has serious revenue and profit implications for our business.”
Since the company’s entire business runs on SQL servers, they were able to realize a return on their investment almost immediately.

“Kopis is fast. We don’t have the luxury to go deep behind the scenes across all of the applications we’ve implemented to figure out what’s going wrong. Now, every month, we get a proactive look at all of the ports and processes that have a lot of execution and runtime. Kopis brings this data to us in a clear, simple report and lets us know what we can do to increase efficiency—always with the offer of support, consultation, and additional evaluation if we want it. We know that safety net is there.”

“It’s wonderful to get to use fractional resources to keep our databases running in peak condition. I don’t have to tie up my team, which means we get to troubleshoot and do what we love. With our number of end users, our departments, complicated supply chains and other business operations, and our number of locations, we’re always needed. We can’t be DBA’s in our spare time. We couldn’t have been effective DBA’s 2 years ago—and we certainly can’t do it now.”