Reflections on Customer Visits
Two weeks back I wrapped up 6 customer meetings in 2 ½ days in the Southern US. We met with a number of Fortune 500 companies in the Shipping and Healthcare industries. One was an existing customer, and the rest were prospects.
Insufficient failover options. Maintenance issues. Database migration difficulties. Performance problems. Although ScaleArc prospects and customers have very different business models, the patterns and pain points are all too similar.
The companies I spoke to all were concerned about keeping their business-critical applications and websites available to customers. Many initially thought that they had done what was required to keep the apps running and available but soon found that their underlying infrastructure wasn’t capable of supporting continuous availability – failovers at the database level ended up taking down the app. Maintenance of database environments created downtime and injected significant inefficiencies for the Operations team, Database administrators, and App Developers.
The one customer that already understood how database traffic management software enabled them to deliver zero downtime for apps was now looking at other ways to apply the ScaleArc software to serve more use cases.
Some interesting anecdotes from these meetings:
- The head of the Oracle infrastructure at one company verified what we hear all the time - while Oracle RAC provides relatively high availability if a primary database fails, the apps cannot withstand the burst of errors that occurs during failover. The result is a substantial outage. This same issue prevents the company from having easy maintenance windows to patch Oracle databases.
- From a SQL Server perspective, all the customers that have legacy applications on SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 are trying to figure out the proper migration path to SQL 2012 or SQL 2014. These customers want to utilize the AlwaysOn technology from Microsoft, but also must contain costs for the upgrades.
- Maintenance of database environments across the board is a massive pain point for every customer. One healthcare customer told me that maintenance requires a day of downtime, and takes 4 days to recover. Brutal.
Several customers have tried database caching with app-side technologies. Some have outright failed, others are not satisfied with the results.
If any of these challenges sound familiar, ScaleArc’s database traffic management software can provide the answer. ScaleArc software creates an abstraction layer that radically changes the way organizations build and support applications, and dramatically lowers costs. One huge benefit is to help move organizations to a zero downtime environment, eliminating both planned and unplanned downtime. Customer also use ScaleArc’s software to migrate to the latest version of SQL Server *without* modifying applications, and can reduce hardware footprint and licensing costs. And the beauty of it all is that ScaleArc’s software can be transparently dropped between the app and the database without expending resources or modifying a single line of code.
Finally, I also love hearing quotes like “ScaleArc saved our bacon.” With these types of validations, we know we’re on the right track.
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