DH2i Blog Article

Containerize and Conquer: Achieve Your SQL Server Modernization Dreams

Josh Achtemeier

March 8, 2023

Containerization in production. The technology of our dreams, promising to unlock unparalleled agility. Today, containers have become even more than that. They have evolved into a vital tool for IT pros to modernize their SQL Server environments. Gartner predicts that 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2026, so this technology is well on its way to establishing itself as the new industry precedent.

Unsurprisingly, modernizing your SQL Server environment(s) with containers is accompanied by an initial expense. However, SQL Server containers unlock powerful benefits that ultimately enable your organization to reduce overall costs, enhance performance and agility, and push total downtime to zero.

Reduce Overall Costs

Inherently, containers are lightweight, agile, and flexible. Organizations can use them to help deploy business-critical workloads more swiftly and consistently across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud servers. This “consistency” is the critical factor that helps organizations reduce overall costs. Containers help unify differing orchestration tools and management systems to increase time to market for applications, and significantly reduce the recurring management expense. They can allow you to create the perfect pay-as-you-go multi-cloud or hybrid environment to maximize cost-efficiency. And because multiple containers can be run on any given server, big savings can be achieved through consolidation of your SQL Server environment as well.

Bridge Your Organization to Easy Cloud Adoption

The allure of the cloud is clear for organizations. Unparalleled agility and the ability to easily scale your organization’s environment to match operational needs. Containerizing your SQL Server can absolutely enhance application portability within your existing cloud deployments, or help pave the way to a new hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure for your company. Containers ensure that applications run consistently, regardless of the infrastructure they are hosted on.

Achieve a Virtually Zero Downtime SQL Server

Containerizing your organization’s SQL Server environment—the home of some of your most valuable data assets—has obviously not always been straightforward. Downtime mitigation is a significant concern, and appropriately so. Relying on pod-level high availability alone is a grossly inadequate level of protection for many global organizations whose cost-of-downtime can reach 7-figure sums every hour.

DH2i’s DxEnterprise (DxE) can completely resolve this concern as the only clustering solution on the market capable of facilitating fully automatic database-level failover of SQL Server Availability Groups in Kubernetes. This capability unlocks failover automation at the database level and ultimately shrinks failover windows from minutes to seconds for containerized SQL Server.

SQL Server Modernization is Easier Than Ever with Containers

Aging infrastructure in the context of SQL Server can be a dangerous vulnerability and a slippery slope the longer you ignore it. Leveraging the power of containers to modernize is the easiest path to the future for any organization though. While the initial cost can be a hurdle, the integration of production containers in your environment ensures an eventual and significant reduction in management and infrastructure costs your organization faces. It also enables a scalable and optimized existence for your SQL Server assets in the cloud. Most importantly however, containerizing your SQL Server environment unlocks absolute minimum downtime, but only if you are leveraging appropriate HA clustering technology.

If you’re curious about learning more about how DH2i’s DxEnterprise unlocks a containerized SQL Server ecosystem with virtually zero downtime, reach out and schedule a personalized demo with our team.