Case Study: Microsoft Corporation achieves seamless cross-data-center failover and zero-downtime availability with ScaleArc

Microsoft Calls On ScaleArc to Ensure the Continuous Availability and Performance of its Premier Community Website

Microsoft’s answers.microsoft.com community site—serving about 1.7 million users a day—faced a critical upgrade and infrastructure move: migrate from SQL Server 2008 to 2014 and shift from physical to virtual data centers while maintaining 24x7 availability across four geographic sites. The new virtual environment broke the previous Windows Failover Clustering model and SQL Server 2014’s AlwaysOn lacked load balancing, replication awareness, and reliable failover detection, forcing Microsoft to find a way to preserve uptime without rewriting the application.

Microsoft deployed ScaleArc’s database load‑balancing software to augment AlwaysOn, transparently integrating with SQL Server 2014 to detect primaries, queue and forward transactions during failover, and provide geo‑aware load balancing and read/write split with no app changes. The result: go‑live in four months instead of nine, seamless cross‑data‑center failover, zero‑downtime maintenance and patching, full use of all servers (8x traffic capacity), and significantly improved site availability and performance.

Microsoft Corporation

Michael Schaeffer

Senior Services Engineer