Entain uses the latest Azure-powered services to help manage its on-premises SQL infrastructure

Entain, one of the world's largest sports betting and gaming groups, is a longtime user of Microsoft SQL Server products and technology. With a global presence subject to multiple data sovereignty rules and legal jurisdictions, along with high-performance requirements for handling gaming transactions, its large on-premises SQL infrastructure has evolved over time to become a complex and highly optimized system.

“We’re dealing with a very large amount of data,” explains Entain Principal Software Engineer Georg Stoifl, “and when a game ends, we see extremely high spikes in transactions as bets are settled. Peak loads of up to 2 million transactions per minute are common, so we need them to be very fast.”

Given these requirements, Entain’s team has become expert in operating petabyte-scale, high-performance SQL Server workloads, building out an optimized database infrastructure.

“We built our on-premises SQL Server architecture over many years,” continues Stoifl. “We have excellent database engineering and SQL developer teams. Our system is currently rock solid, but we’re always looking at the newest features to identify how to further optimize our system landscape.”

The Entain team has consistently been on the lookout for ways to improve its infrastructure, for example, by adopting the latest SQL Server 2022 features. They have also begun to integrate AMD-based hardware into Entain’s infrastructure by taking advantage of the latest processor compatibility capabilities of Windows Server 2022 and nested virtualization for AMD processors in Hyper-V. In addition to exploring how to use Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes clusters to manage some of these workloads, the team has been investigating how Azure-based technology can help them manage their large on-premises database infrastructure more efficiently.

Concerns about data gravity and latency, along with regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, mean that on-premises hosting is still required for Entain in certain areas. However, on-premises hosting means that Entain’s IT team is responsible for implementing monitoring and management systems for its SQL infrastructure. Contrast this with cloud-hosted SQL Server workloads, which benefit from many capabilities that are built into the cloud platform, significantly simplifying management and monitoring tasks. 

SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc aims to bridge this management gap between on-premises and cloud-hosted scenarios. It provides a hybrid solution that brings many Azure management and monitoring capabilities to on-premises SQL Server infrastructure, providing new capabilities and simplifying IT management workload.

As the Entain team started looking at SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc, they were interested in new Azure-enabled features that can enhance and extend its existing monitoring and management capabilities.

“We currently use another software vendor for monitoring our on-premises servers,” notes Stoifl, “and it gives us a lot of good information. But it doesn’t offer us a single inventory of our many SQL Server instances the way Azure Arc can. This is new for us.”

Entain Team Lead for Database Engineering Anthony Juryit points out, “The best practices assessment feature is potentially very useful, especially if we can apply it at scale across our server inventory. For example, after performing updates, it would be very easy to run the assessment and ensure all of our servers are still configured correctly.”

Integrating AI with these capabilities is also an area of interest. “Based on inventory data and the best practices,” Stoifl says, “we may be able to just ask Microsoft Copilot for information about misconfigurations or other issues with our servers. It could save our database administrators—who are busy with other tasks—a lot of time.”

To learn more about this service and how it can bring advanced Azure capabilities to your existing cloud and on-premises SQL workloads, read The Bridge - How Azure Arc brings cloud innovation to SQL Server anywhere.