Start your business engines! Here’s an interesting case from BMW. Get inspired to have a tech-makeover yourself by learning how a top-of-the class business revamped its game with cutting-edge technology. Ready, set, let’s go!
Red light: The challenge
Founded in 1916, the BMW Group is a Global automobile and motorcycle manufacturer with 25 production facilities in 14 countries. It makes and sells nearly 2 million cars each year (plus yachts!), so naturally the amount of applications needed to run such operations, furthermore ensuring the generated data is easily available to employees, is critical. A 24/7 availability should be possible for everyone, from financial services and manufacturing employees to agents at dealerships.
In addition, the organisation has databases which grow an average of 20-30 percent each year, making scalability also a priority.
As a result, in the spring of 2013 the BWM Group decided to search for cost-effective new database technology in order to address its needs for high availability and scalability.
Yellow Light: Finding a the right route
It was time for the Server 2014 Enterprise to take the wheel! It includes AlwaysOn Availability Groups, a feature which provides high availability and disaster recovery for multiple SQL Server databases without the need for a shared storage area network.
![BMW2_Thumb[1]](https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/03/BMW2_Thumb1.png)
Moreover, it supports up to eight secondary replica databases, which can be used to distribute read-only database workloads and provide enhanced recoverability. The technology also continuously synchronises transactions from the primary replica to each secondary replica, further improving availability and disaster recovery.
SQL Server 2014 also includes enhanced AlwaysOn diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities, so administrators have more visibility into issues.
Green Light: Crossing the finish line!
With SQL Server 2014 Availability Groups, BMW Group easily met its 99.999 percent availability requirement, performing system maintenance without affecting business operations.
Additionally, the company expects to reduce its operating costs significantly because it no longer needs to use its storage replication solution.
BMW Group will be able to easily keep up with its database growth. Now, when customers request a new database, the company will be able to build it easily.
Additionally, the solution’s diagnostic capabilities will help BMW Group administrators save time on troubleshooting. With SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn Availability Groups, the organisation has the flexibility to move things around, which makes it easy to contain databases for specific hardware components. The latter will help administrators save time in isolating anomalies and identifying problems.
