DIGITAL SOLUTION FOR BRANDS WITH DEALER NETWORKS SEES OPERATIONAL GAINS FROM MIGRATING MICROSOFT SQL SERVER WORKLOADS TO AWS

PowerChord leveraged Rackspace’s migration experience and managed services to migrate and optimize legacy Microsoft SQL Server workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

R ACKSPACE AND AMA ZON WEB SERVICES

C A S E ST U DY | P OW E RC H O R D

About PowerchordPowerChord is a leading Software as a Service (SaaS) company that offers digital solutions for brands with dealer networks. PowerChord’s advanced technology works with global manufacturers to provide brand-specific local websites to their dealer networks. These Digital Storefronts help manufacturers protect their brand, engage customers, and grow local revenue — while giving independent dealers the ability to compete against large, online retailers. The PowerChord Platform also includes hyper-local digital marketing strategies that scale national campaigns into personalized dealer campaigns, and flexible digital services to win local search and drive dealer sales.

Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, PowerChord operates in 28 countries and services over 10,000 local sites worldwide, with employees based across the United States and Europe.

The ChallengePowerChord was spending too much time and too many resources to maintain the Microsoft SQL Server workloads supporting a client’s website. Additionally, due to the legacy nature of their existing environment, the client was having a hard time scaling when demands would increase unexpectedly. IT operational tasks like backups and managing routing at the server level were too time-consuming for PowerChord to perform efficiently.

Ultimately, PowerChord wanted to increase the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the Microsoft applications behind their client’s website.

Key Considerations WHY AWS PowerChord knew that they required a cloud provider that could introduce opportunities to lower both capital and operational spend as well as increase the performance and reliability of their client’s Microsoft SQL Server workloads, without requiring PowerChord to shoulder the burden of managing database administration tasks.

AWS offered PowerChord an impressive breadth and depth of mature cloud services that would enable them to meet those goals.

WHY RACKSPACE As Rackspace was already helping PowerChord re-factor and migrate other types of workloads to AWS, they were a natural choice for this project. PowerChord had been impressed with the Rackspace level of expertise and knew they could help them not only efficiently migrate their SQL workloads to AWS, but also optimize them for agility and performance.

The SolutionRackspace began with an in-depth discovery phase, deciding on the best approach and solution for PowerChord. With the help of Rackspace, leveraging AWS services and capabilities, PowerChord was able to:

• Migrate legacy SQL Servers to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

• Capitalize on Amazon RDS managed services to minimize the manual effort required to keep SQL workloads running smoothly and backed up.

• Save around 40% on their steady-state environment, with the potential to save even more down the road after introducing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and other cost-saving measures.

• Encrypt their data using SQL Standard, saving the additional cost they would incur with SQL Enterprise.

• Implement AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) into their environment for increased protection against web attacks.

• Utilize application load balancers rather than classic load balancers, enabling them to reduce the number of load balancers needed from 28 to three.

• Build AWS CloudFormation templates for production environments, to deploy faster and more predictably.

• Use Amazon ElastiCache as a fully managed Redis services for output caching.

• Consolidate billing to simplify IT cost management.

• Provision servers on-demand to optimize operational efficiency and get to market faster.

• Free up the IT and ops team to shift focus away from server management, towards providing new value to their customers.

“Ultimately, I’m a technician, but I still don’t want to stare at my servers—I want to deliver value to my clients.”MICHAEL VAN DIEST :: DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING AT POWERCHORD

2 CUSTOMER CASE STUDY :: POWERCHORD

ABOUT RACKSPACERackspace, the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies. The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace is a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, and has been honored by Fortune, Forbes and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com

LEARN MOREStart migrating your Microsoft workloads to AWS with the experts at Rackspace. Visit rackspace.com

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