Case Study: Dell achieves 100% uptime and zero-downtime maintenance on Dell.com with ScaleArc

ScaleArc Helps Dell Achieve Zero Downtime on Dell.com

Dell.com faced a high-stakes availability challenge: to handle a 10x traffic surge for Black Friday and the holiday season, avoid downtime during database maintenance and infrastructure changes, and leverage SQL Server AlwaysOn without changing website code. The operations team needed a fast, non-disruptive way to increase uptime, throughput and scalability for the SQL Server tier supporting the site.

Dell deployed ScaleArc’s database load‑balancing software between the web application and SQL Server, using automatic read/write split and integration with AlwaysOn to queue connections during failovers and steer traffic across data centers. The result was 100% uptime during peak traffic, a 3–5x increase in read query capacity, zero‑downtime maintenance and seamless cross‑region failover — plus performance gains from caching “bad” queries that halved page download times, all with no app or database code changes.

Dell

Justin Roan

IT director