Blue Bridge was awarded the public tender for the project. According to Algirdas Lunys, Head of Infrastructure Management Solutions at the company, the project consisted of three main phases: analysis of the existing infrastructure, testing of the upgrades, and the implementation of the actual upgrade.

“In the case of newer systems, the likelihood of failures caused by the upgrade was low. However, upgrading the MS Dynamics NAV infrastructure, which was launched more than a decade ago and had many integrations, was not straightforward. This was primarily because it was difficult to predict exactly what impact an upgrade would have on the performance of the application. Especially since it was planned to “jump” through several versions of SQL Server and databases,” says Lunys.

E. Stankūnas adds to this by noting that the information gathered during the planning of the upgrade assumed that the newer version of SQL, to which it was intended to migrate, would be compatible with MS Dynamics NAV 2009. However, only actual testing could provide more detailed insights.
“When the compatibility of the upgrade was tested, we were satisfied that the core functionality of the system was working. However, we had in mind that the volumes of data used for testing are much smaller than the volumes that the system has to process in reality. Therefore, even after a successful test, the migration was partly based on theoretical assumptions”, he smiles.

The upgrade did not really avoid challenges. Although the upgrade was technically successful, the performance of the system’s core functions slowed down considerably.

“We worked together with the developers who contributed to the system and the Blue Bridge team to find a solution to the problem, which required additional work not only on the usual aspects of SQL, but also on the nuances of the application. Without these joint efforts, we would probably not have had such good results and a stable system”, – says Stankūnas.

Despite the inconveniences experienced immediately after the upgrade of the SQL infrastructure, the project was completed within the expected timeframe of five months and the value created by the consolidation and upgrade of the SQL servers is lasting.

“The consolidation of the servers allowed us to achieve the key objective of reducing the number of licensed objects from 25 to 12, and thus the cost of the IT infrastructure,” says Mr Stankūnas.

“Algirdas Lunys of Blue Bridge explains that the reduction in IT infrastructure maintenance costs has been achieved by carrying out a number of key works. First of all, by removing the dedicated server for each system and merging them, thus combining 16 servers into 5: “Since the number of licences was directly related to the number of cores assigned to the systems, by collecting the SQL Server system performance indicators, analysing and correlating them, we managed to reduce the number of cores without damaging the performance of the systems.”

Another important result achieved is that newer versions of SQL have enabled the standardisation of the SQL Server infrastructure. In the future, this will not only allow the functionality of the new versions to be exploited, but also reduce the cost and time spent on maintaining systems and testing new functionality for applications.