any one used ScaleArc tool to handle automatic failover of servers and load balancing?

Question

i have come across tool called ScaleArc which helps in handling auto failover, caching, dynamic load balancing etc.. is there anyone who used it? and how can i download it and integrate it to ssms

Answer 1

I can attest to using ScaleArc successfully within our SSAS CRM automotive platform consisting of 4000+ Databases on 100+ SQL Servers in our production environment.

ScaleArc is an appliance that you add your SQL Server Availability groups to that provide caching of current login activity which include customizable load balancing across all the replicas within that group. The only requirement is that you have SQL Server Always on configured on your servers and ScaleArc does the rest; very easy to implement!

We have experienced automatic failovers within our single point of failure servers and NONE of our customers even noticed. We have also conducted daytime maintenance that has required us to failover to secondary nodes during business hours again; no customer impact.

If uptime is of extreme concern to you; then ScaleArc is your answer. Prior to ScaleArc; we experienced a lot of downtime, now we have a %99.9999 uptime record on our Single point of failure servers.

I hope this helps!

Michael Atkins, Director, IT Operations

Answer 2

I will second Mr. Atkins experience although my implementation was much smaller. It enabled us to reduce our SQL server footprint from 22 SQL servers to 12 and with smaller SKU's dropping our overall costs by more than the ScaleArc investment. Adding to that the increased uptime and drop in issue investigations, it was a great investment.

I put ScaleArc in place for a customer support forum and it does a great job with failovers and makes patching much easier as you can leverage the script builder to take servers in an out of rotation gracefully and then add them to the run book for your patching and deployment activities. Our uptime went up considerably after the ScaleArc implementation, >99.99%.

The automatic load balancing algorithm actually improved performance by sending calls to a 2nd datacenter 65ms away. When we saw this in the report, we were able to dig into the code and find two bugs that needed to be addressed.

I strongly recommend that you take a look at ScaleArc. It may not be right for every engagement, but is well worth the time to see.

Michael Schaeffer Senior Business Program Manager