Mouser Electronics Stays Online with Active/Active Data Center Operations and Zero Downtime Maintenance from ScaleArc
Mouser Electronics, a Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway company, is a leading global distributor of semiconductors and electronic components. Over the past several years, Mouser has experienced phenomenal growth of its online electronic component sales. Even a minute of website downtime costs thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Mouser deployed ScaleArc in conjunction with SQL Server 2014 and its AlwaysOn feature set to enable failover without application errors and support load balancing across its data centers, enabling distribution of the database load.
Mark Price, director of Internet operations and architecture for Mouser Electronics, has implemented ScaleArc’s broad feature set and survived a substantial database outage without impacting customer access. For these reasons, ScaleArc named Price as the inaugural ScaleArc Uptime Hero winner.
"A few days ago, we sustained a sudden hardware failure, which caused a hard shut down of our primary SQL Server node without warning. There were over 1,000 active sessions on the cluster at 40,000 requests per second, but ScaleArc instantly load balanced the reads to the remaining servers and buffered the write requests while the SQL cluster passed Primary to another node. All kinds of alerts were triggered, but by the time the response team had rushed to their workstations, the ScaleArc/SQL cluster had already handled the situation. The recovery was fully automatic - there was no outage, no dropped sessions, and no tangible customer impact. Impressive."
-- Mark Price, director of Internet operations and architecture, Mouser Electronics
Mouser's Challenges:
- Boost performance and availability of mission-critical component ordering application
- Overcome hardware failure of primary database server without downtime to the website
- Move from active/stand-by data center to active/active data center at the database tier
Mouser's Results:
- 40% of queries are being served from ScaleArc’s cache, boosting performance of Mouser’s website and alleviating load from its database servers
- Maintained zero downtime, thus saving Mouser thousands of dollars per minute from potential down time
- During full hardware failure of primary SQL Server node, ScaleArc load balanced reads to remaining servers and buffered write requests while the SQL cluster passed Primary to another node
- Eliminated maintenance windows - ScaleArc allows Mouser to take servers down for maintenance without interrupting service to its global 24x7 eCommerce website
Benefits:
Integration with SQL Server 2014 for Continuous Availability – ScaleArc’s software integrates with AlwaysOn, learning server cluster and status information from it. As with Mouser’s hardware failure, ScaleArc’s software detects when a primary has failed and maintains client connections and queues inbound queries during the failover. Once the secondary has become the new primary, ScaleArc forwards the queued transactions, preventing application errors during failover.
Zero Downtime Maintenance – Because Mouser’s eCommerce website serves global customers 24x7, zero downtime maintenance is a key capability for the IT organization. Mouser can now leverage the ScaleArc failover technology to eliminate maintenance windows and avoid application downtime while keeping servers fully up to date with patches.
Auto Failover for High Availability Across Data Centers – Mouser needed strong failover not just within one data center but across to its second data center. The ScaleArc software automates and accelerates the failover process for unplanned server failure by effectively steering and load balancing traffic across both data centers.