High-Availability Hybrid Cloud Architecture Case Study

This case study details the collaboration between SmartestEnergy and Data Intensity to achieve a high-availability hybrid cloud architecture while reducing licensing costs. SmartestEnergy, a prominent energy supplier, faced challenges during a data center migration to a single co-location data center, necessitating a redesign of their production SQL Server architecture. The objective was to incorporate on-premise resilience and disaster recovery capabilities using Microsoft Azure. Data Intensity designed a stretched three-node Windows Server 2019 Failover cluster, which included two on-premise nodes and a third Azure VM node. The SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition Failover instance was configured to meet resilience requirements, allowing for database mirroring to the Azure node. The implementation utilized a single database listener for application connectivity, ensuring all databases operated within the same availability group. The case study concludes with the benefits of combining native SQL Server high-availability technologies, achieving resilience without incurring higher licensing costs.