JP Morgan Chase: Banking on SQLHA

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) is one of the oldest financial institutions in the United States. With a history dating back over 200 years.  JPMC is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.2 trillion, operating in more than 60 countries with more than 240,000 employees.  JPMorgan Chase serves millions of consumers, small businesses and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients.

Business Challenge
JPMorgan Chase chose SQLHA for two high-profile projects intended to reduce licensing, hardware and physical footprints while increasing system performance and agility.  The first project entailed designing a SQL-as-a-Service architecture to support over 5,000 instances.  The second was a migration of over 5,000 branch locations from DB2 to SQL Server.

• Reduce physical infrastructure footprint while improving performance, scalability and reliability
• High risk- new system would change the experience and approach for the typical application that is hosted on SQL Server
• Potentially manage 5-6000 SQL servers factoring in all lifecycle management factors including security, scalability, HA, DR, monitoring, auditing and daily maintenance
• Produce brand new instances within a 24 hour turnaround time
• Develop process that would allow migration from DB2 to SQL at all branch locations
• Develop a utility that would be able to migration the financial data from DB2 to SQL Server and do this for up to 1,500 branch locations across the country in a 2 hour period
• No downtime allowed during migration- if any/all branches were down, customers would be unable to perform any banking operations at the local branches

Engagement Summary
Working with JPMC’s DB engineering team to design a SQLaaS environment, SQLHA identified the core configurations for the physical environment and designed the operational and management offerings for the environment.  This took into account security, auditing, compliance, backup strategy, HA, DR, monitoring, performance tuning and provisioning of the server itself.  Lastly, we developed a groundbreaking migration utility that migrated 1500/branches a night, all in a 2-hour period, running 600 concurrent conversions across the WAN.

• Identified the core configurations for the physical environment, designed test cases to perform against 3 vendors hardware platforms to determine the optimal configuration and hardware solution for the future state environment
• Conducted comparison by running TPCC, TPCH and batch tests across 16 VMs that were hosted on the different hardware platforms while capturing and analyzing all of the test results
• Developed a utility that would be able to migration the financial data from DB2 to SQL Server and do this for up to 1,500 branch locations across the country in a 2 hour period
• Each migration had to verify and validate the data was successfully migrated 100% since this was critical financial data
• Process had to be designed to take into account the network limitations, the limited functionality in SQL Server Express, ability to manage the processes for start, stop, rollback and failover scenarios, massively parallel and perform the migration in under 2 hours
• Process was designed using SQL Server Integration Services and allowed a single branch to be fully pre-checked, migrated and validated in an average of 10 minutes

Results
JPMC was able to meet business requirements around footprint reduction and efficiency while completing a successful migration.

• Reduce license, hardware cost
• Reduced physical server footprint by 1200%
• New virtualized base image configured to produce brand new instances within a 24 hour turnaround time
• Migration completed within timelines without end user pain