FIS: Credit SQLHA for Uptime

Fidelity Information Services (FIS) is one of the world’s top-ranked technology providers to the banking industry. With more than 33,000 experts in 100 countries, FIS is part of the S&P 500. FIS has also been named the number one overall financial technology provider in the world by American Banker and Financial Insights (FinTech 100).

Business Challenge
FIS was running on one of the most complex replicated environments we had ever seen.  Microsoft’s premier support couldn’t help because the environment was running on SQL2000, which was no longer supported.  SQLHA was brought in to take over project management and lead technical activity over all internal DBA staff and other external consultants.

• Consistent outages jeopardized credit card purchases and affected ability to report on credit card revenue
• Extremely diverse and complex environment running on a non-supported version of SQL Server
• Upgrade needed to be performed within 2.5 months to meet business timeline

Engagement Summary
SQLHA coordinated several resources and led an intense 2.5 month project that saw massive concurrent upgrades and support efforts.  We teamed with Microsoft Consulting Services to validate builds for OS, SAN and SQL Servers while ensuring no end users were affected by the upgrade.

• SQL Server Upgrade\Hardware Upgrade\Change the Replication from 2 way to 3 way across the country
• 1-for-1 upgrade, added a vertical tier for environment moving data bi-directionally across the country 24×7
• Design the base builds for the OS, SAN and SQL Servers
• Simultaneously support production
• Develop plan for upgrading the 2 current bi-directional replicated environments and adding a new replication direction to make it a 3 way replication environment
• Tune the replicated environment for cross-country traffic and core transactional performance
• Project Management:  2 months to plan, design, implement and performance test the environment before Black Friday

Results
The project finished successfully ahead of deadline and the business was able to function appropriately during its busiest season.  The new environment performed at a higher level on less resources, creating a far more efficient and usable environment.

• New environment is highly available, more resilient
• Performance tuning exercises reduced response time and increased peak capacity
• Performance improvements reduced the core TPS by 500% while exceeding the previous year’s load by 100%.
• Replicated environment eliminated high latency or transaction times that were experienced previously
• SQL Servers replicating bi-directionally across the country, receiving financial transactions for credit card and pre-paid card applications
• 100% of the upgrades were done 2 weeks before Black Friday