The Challenge
The airline industry is fast paced and relies on incredible computing power to maintain performance. This major US airline manages massive workloads on a 24/7 basis. The company had been operating Sybase ASE on Linux for years, but was in need of a system upgrade. In 2016, performance challenges and high overhead reinforced this need. The decision was made to upgrade to ASE 16 to improve high availability rates and system stability. In order to maintain services throughout the process, downtime needed to be minimized, so they needed help to devise a specialized upgrade strategy and implementation plan.
The Approach
The organization set about researching its alternatives. It determined that a remote DBA and database managed service provider could not only deliver the services they needed, it could potentially save them much of the cost and frustration related to hiring in-house. Additionally, MSP’s also perform one-off valuable services like emergency assistance, “lift and shift” to the cloud, security assessments, and even database migrations.
The Solution
Their Director of IT knew the major challenge would be avoiding downtime throughout the process. They needed a Sybase expert to help plan and manage the project. The company’s team reached out to SAP so that they could identify the best person for this critical job. They were referred to Spinnaker Support. Spinnaker’s team worked hand-in-hand with the client to devise a strategy for the upgrade and migration that would minimize the downtime and maintain system fidelity. Through a phased approach, the system was upgraded to the ASE 16 and migrated to the newest Linux platform. Spinnaker also devised an extended Disaster Recovery (DR) plan to increase the system stability.
The Results
The migration and upgrade was so successful that the airline has continued to work with Spinnaker as a database managed services client. Spinnaker Support maintains the system for continually smooth upgrades and routine IT processes. Since the migration, their system is now far ahead of the game. With high availability on both the application and database levels, they are able to support the continuous functions of the mission-critical systems. The improved architecture of the platform has allowed them to enjoy increased scalability that will last them for years to come.