MicroStrategy Upgrade for a Top Financial Services Firm

Stable and high-performing environments require constant maintenance and upkeep. The client’s business teams were heavily dependent upon MicroStrategy tools, and demand was only increasing.  As a result, the existing MicroStrategy infrastructure hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) needed a full revamp. In order to scale the environment to support organic growth and meet the customer demand, the Operations Team was engaged in regular patching, and changing the software stack to allow cutting edge technology. The ever-increasing load on the platform caused frequent bottlenecks and performance issues leading to disruption in business continuity. There was a need to revisit the existing enterprise platform, analyze the platform capacity shortage, estimate the increase in capacity and determine a way to continually scale up to meet the increased demand in the future.

The client had multiple environments supporting different business verticals. Since each business has their own priorities, it was challenging to pull together a team to upgrade the application. Resources were stretched thin, and the subject matter experts were overloaded.

An additional challenge the client faced was to upgrade the underlying Operating System to support the newer version of the application. Upgrading Operating System at this client is equivalent to building new infrastructure here which involves additional cost incurred by the client to pay for two parallel MicroStrategy sites running. With all these requirements combined, the client approached Stratacent knowing their background and expertise in building such multi-tier Business Intelligence architectures.

Stratacent consolidated the different business verticals to build a highly available multi-tier, multi-node environment.

The new environment allowed the heavy load generated by the business applications in peak times to be distributed across the new MicroStrategy environment. This unique architecture allowed the platform to scale up to support increased business demand. The nodes could be increased at any given time with minimal downtime to the existing application workload. Additionally, the nodes could be allocated for dedicated use to individual business teams, eliminating the competition for resources.

The Stratacent team partnered with the client to address all aspects of this application upgrade, the team created questionnaires for every application team and documents on code changes. They worked with the application SMEs to guide and train them on how to run the applications on the new platform and what changes to expect on the new platform. This documentation would also allow the client to run through future upgrades in a very efficient manner.

Technologies Used: MicroStrategy Desktop, MicroStrategy Developer, MicroStrategy WorkStation, Command Manager, Enterprise Manager, Integrity Manager, Object Manager Platform, Linux, Windows, Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2, Hadoop, Sybase and Vertica

The new architecture implemented with all the new features helped the client address its challenge with application and infrastructure upgrades. This enhanced the platform availability and health by leaps and bounds and also created an easy way to introduce new businesses to the platform.

By completing the upgrade before the deadlines, Stratacent was not only able to keep the application in compliance, but also enable new features and functionality for all of the users.