Design and implementing a failover cluster, troubleshooting the IT infrastructure for a state agency in the oil and gas sector.

Client:

Governmental agency in oil and gas field.

Case review:

Client is an governmental agency authorized to collect quarterly reports from mining companies. Reports were submitted online, via a web service. Client was experiencing a few issues. First, at the top submission days (5-10 days before the deadline), web service periodically failed due to huge load. Second, just a few weeks before the next report period, in-house systems administrators unexpectedly left the company, taking out all access codes to information systems, server and network hardware.

Objectives:

Restore admin access to information systems and server hardware; resolve the issues with web service occurring at peak days.

Technologies:

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Cisco ASA
• VMWare vSphere

Result:

To address the objectives, our engineers reset the passwords on Cisco ASA firewall, Catalyst switch, VMWare hypervisor, and all virtual machines.

Once admin access was restored, and performance of all services was recovered, we designed a fault-tolerant cluster consisting of 2 nodes, based on Microsoft Hyper-V.

Client’s information systems were based on .NET technologies, and employed Microsoft SQL Server Database. Microsoft IIS Web-server and MS SQL Server were deployed using network load balancer that helped to improve the performance of web-application, and decrease the load on each node during the peak hours. In addition, such balancing provides an extra level of fault-tolerance in case of failure of a service within a web-application – all unhandled requests would be transferred to a working node by the load balancer.