Sify - Surety infinite

No one better than we ourselves understands our strengths and weakness but those perceptions are really tested in tough situations and most of the times the internal strengths which we boasts on proves to be weakness when time comes calling. The same happened with me even, I use to boast on my grip and insight on database application, management and fine tuning as I was successfully handling, managing the database and architecture for almost eleven years.

To add more to my confidence were the certification on database application, architecture and management which I have scored in my carrier and most of the time I successfully overcome the challenges of known unknown situations of database crash, performance tuning and malicious attacks.

I was working on the project wherein I was in charge of migrating two big portals and multiple websites from one location to another. Prima facie it looks like a simple job and yes it was, provided one has a strong team who takes care of multiple aspects of networks, hardware, application and database and you as a project manager you patch with multiple stakeholder and control the operation. But to my surprise I was working with only one or two resources at any given point of time on this ultra ambitious project and to my agony the resources were not fully equipped to understand the nitty-gritty of the entire project.

As program manager I was aware of skewed resource pool and resource engagement that the project demanded and I decided to outsource most of the non-core activities to the service provider which in turn was there core business line. After a long drawn process of vendor selection, negotiation for solutions and prices, we selected Sify Technologies ltd ,there solutions and pricing appeared to be very aggressive and pocket friendly and we were very impressed by the in-depth knowledge and understanding of the team on the desired solution, inclination of the team to understand the customer requirement and to assist the customer was superb.

Keeping fingers crossed we moved our network from existing location to Sify’s data centre, any migration is a tricky job and for an online business which is 24X7 and acknowledged globally it becomes more tricky and complicated. Transition of online assets happened smoothly and everything appeared to be fine… but I was little skeptical for the database performance as we were migrating to a newer version of the database. Though water testing and regressive checking were all positive, but still I was bit skeptical as during testing phase one can’t simulate online real traffic; I was expecting some sort of disturbance or last minute rush to happen.

After going live with the new infrastructure on cloud and with a few hours of operation we started getting database timeouts we immediately checked index and fragmentation status, prima facie it appeared working fine and reflected the latest date but still things were not that fine.

We were trying to figure out the probable cause of timeouts we introspected everything within the network, firewall, connectivity between the server, indexes, queries, the storage device and what not. Finally we concluded that the indexes are the culprit and they didn’t behaved in the manner we anticipated.

I was not having enough resource pool to answer this sudden priority requirement and post migration there were lot of activities internally, externally and at network level which were to be changed as per new infrastructure.

But as we were subscribed for the database management activities we immediately called the Sify team and asked them to ascertain the root case and fine tune the database if possible. They responded within 8 hours and fine tuned the database to an excellent level, which I think was not possible for me to pursue independently.

DBA Team from Sify showcased/implemented their knowledge and in-depth understanding about the database and structure and thank God we were able to stabilize that.

Kudos to the team for making me feel proud of our decision of selecting Sify as technology partner in our business endeavors