Like other organizations, Asante looked to virtualization to solve many of its datacenter challenges. They needed to consolidate, control costs and achieve higher availability for their business-critical systems. While virtualization did provide some wins, there were still workloads that could not be collapsed — particularly SQL Server applications that required multiple servers for high availability. Because of the business-critical nature of these applications, vendors were building clusters and large over-the-top SQL Servers with lots of redundancy and high availability. This ultimately led to some big issues for Asante with excessive licensing costs and SQL Server sprawl.

Michael York of Asante identified DxEnterprise as an effective instance- level high availability solution, and a viable alternative to clusters for SQL Server applications. Similarly to their approach to virtualization, Asante started with low-hanging fruit to manage with DxEnterprise, but ultimately realized it was applicable across the datacenter.

Eventually, they were able to safely consolidate 15-20 instances per server—helping them save big on server overhead and licensing costs. Along with the massive consolidation benefits and enhancement in high availability, DxEnterprise also helped Asante eliminate operational and lifecycle headaches like patching. It even provided them the single solution needed to enable multi-subnet disaster recovery to protect Asante’s multiple locations. The best part—it could be implemented at any time, on any infrastructure.