Managing Hybrid Database Environments is Key For MSPs

One of the predominant business discussions in technology today is not if a database workload will go to the cloud—but when. That timing will most likely be a moving target in most environments. Workloads will move to and from the cloud for many reasons—some good, and some not so good.

The need to constantly evaluate the best environment for a workload makes the concept of hybrid data platform environments a hot topic in most companies. Businesses need to evaluate migrating data workloads to the location that offers the optimal performance and cost. Because business conditions are ever-changing, your thought process should be focused on technologies that give you the biggest number of options and maximize business value.

Seamless Monitoring On-premises and in the Cloud

The need to move databases from one location to another with minimal interruptions—meaning that everything looks the same regardless of where the database lives—reminds me of an observation made by Charles F. Kettering, the American inventor and longtime head of research at General Motors: “People are very open-minded about new things, as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.”

One of the critical considerations in ongoing cloud migrations will be providing the data professional the same monitoring, actionable information, and performance tuning capabilities for a SQL Server workload regardless of where it's being run. This information minimizes the risk and guesswork of how a workload will perform while providing assurance that it will be cost-effective. And the choice of cloud provider shouldn't affect that monitoring process. As an example, SentryOne has had a longstanding relationship with the Amazon Web Services engineering team, resulting in some of the most powerful monitoring available for Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon EC2.

This ability to support a SQL Server or data warehouse both on-premises and in the cloud is a key consideration when companies and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are looking at tools to support the dynamic nature of the modern hybrid data environment. That's exactly what Ben DeBow, president and founder of Fortified Data, had to take into consideration when picking a solution to integrate into his managed services offering for the Microsoft Data Platform.

“By wrapping SentryOne with Fortified Data’s expertise, we can evaluate a workload on-premises, optimize the performance, lift it to AWS, and monitor it to validate that it is performing efficiently as designed. That is critical to our delivery and our clients’ satisfaction.”

DeBow said that being able to monitor databases in hybrid environments is critical for his business.

“There are many database monitoring tool companies that claim they can support our clients’ needs of monitoring SQL Server on-premises and in AWS,” he said. “But no other tool gives us, and our clients, the seamless view of the hybrid environment that SentryOne does. We had the same valuable performance data for a SQL Server running in AWS RDS as we did for a server running in a client’s data center.”

Keeping pace with the rapid change in data platform technologies is hard enough. Choosing technologies—including monitoring solutions—that support a dynamic hybrid data platform is a smart choice for any MSP offering managed database services.