Standardizing MSC’s IT infrastructure in the cloud with Azure Disk Storage

It’s a tall order to standardize and maintain a globally distributed IT environment. MSC’s on-premises architecture relies on shared storage failover clusters and availability groups to accomplish high availability and disaster recovery. Many business-critical applications, like the company’s main shipment tracking solution, have a single code base. But MSC runs multiple instances of its apps, whether on-premises or in Microsoft Azure, in all the countries where the company has a presence, known as an agency, because each agency has its own requirements. MSC uses this solution to manage container shipping orders.

Access to next-generation cloud automation and standardization

To reduce management complexity and increase agility, MSC began migrating its on-premises infrastructure from a storage area network to the cloud in 2017. In 2019, the company began updating to SQL Server 2019 and the SQL Server Always On high availability and disaster recovery solution.

Initially, MSC converted its three-node solution to a two-node solution using availability group technology in SQL Server, with the two nodes geographically separated for disaster recovery. By July 2020, MSC started beta testing Azure Disk Storage. “With shared disks in Azure Disk Storage, if there’s a problem at the virtual machine level, we can fail over to another node in a matter of seconds,“ says Villegas. “All the new locations we move to the cloud are using shared disks in Azure. We’re also converting workloads to the SQL Server Always On high availability solution to include a failover cluster.”

With shared disks in Azure, MSC can avoid a large overhaul of its current code and architecture. “Moving our internal solution to the cloud with Azure Disk Storage made management easier,” says Villegas. “With the flexibility of Azure standardization, we kept our on-premises shared storage and failover architecture for high availability and disaster recovery.”

To speed migrations along, the company also created small, medium, and large automation templates for its agencies in each country. “Today, we use automation tools to quickly set up failover clusters and shared disks in Azure Disk Storage so that database migrations are easier,” says Villegas. “Setting up a standardized infrastructure in the cloud for new SQL Server clusters now takes a matter of hours.”

Support for data growth with scale, flexibility, and security

MSC also employs a mix of disk types based on the performance and cost needs of its workloads. These include Azure Ultra Disk Storage, which the company uses to deliver highly scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency. “We use a combination of Azure Ultra Disk Storage and Azure Premium SSD for optimal performance and cost control,” says Villegas. With the flexibility to choose different disk types, MSC has matched, and in some cases, exceeded its on-premises performance.

Villegas notes that capacity planning in the on-premises world was a complex task. MSC had to project its needs five to seven years into the future and choose hardware accordingly. “With Azure, adjusting the size of our virtual machines, choosing disk types, sizes, and configurations, and adding IOPS or throughput on the fly is easy,” he says. 

The Azure Disk Storage solution is also highly adaptable. ”Migrating our data and BI infrastructure to the cloud has been extremely positive,” says Villegas. “We gained a lot of flexibility in capacity planning and availability. We can spin up a virtual machine running SQL Server in a few clicks and start working on it right away in a very secure environment that’s highly available by default. We can choose to define any kind of architecture.”

As of January 2022, MSC is running approximately 2,000 Azure virtual machines, including M-series virtual machines. For security, the company uses Microsoft Defender for Identity, formerly known as Azure Advanced Threat Protection. “With Defender for Identity, we get a constant security assessment of our SQL Server and virtual machine configurations,” says Villegas. “Security is a big part of what we do in Azure. Including the database and BI operation, we’re really taking advantage of every available Azure feature.”

A future in the cloud

As a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in data platform, Villegas is always looking for ways to use new Microsoft products and services at MSC. In 2022, new MSC agencies that are migrating to the cloud use the Azure Disk Storage solution, and the company is also converting these workloads to the Azure high availability solution with failover clusters and SQL Server Always On. “We’re constantly evaluating the use of managed services for business intelligence and relational databases, such as Azure Analysis Services and Azure SQL Database,” says Villegas.

The company is also participating in the SQL Server 2022 Early Adoption Program. “Features like query store hints and the next generation of intelligent query processing are awesome,” says Villegas. “Our ability to improve and maintain great performance over time without code changes is getting better with every new version of SQL Server. And the possibility of adding an Azure SQL managed instance to the disaster recovery solution will help us move workloads to the cloud.”

MSC is in a good position to weather whatever comes next. “With Azure, we can standardize on a single platform to help centralize IT management, security, and compliance,” says Villegas. “It also gives us continuous operations and disaster recovery. If something happens to the main virtual machine, we can have another one up and running to take over within seconds with almost no downtime.”

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