Case Study: Black Hills Corporation achieves production-ready MySQL clustering across data centers with Severalnines ClusterControl

Black Hills Corporation - Customer Case Study

Black Hills Corporation, a US-based energy utility, faced the challenge of managing its non-critical MySQL databases which lacked high availability and were causing extended downtimes during disaster recovery tests. Their team of DBAs, while experts in SQL Server and Oracle, lacked deep MySQL expertise and sought an enterprise-grade clustering solution to automate failover, perform backups, and provide effective monitoring across multiple data centers. They turned to Severalnines and its ClusterControl software to address these needs.

By implementing Severalnines' ClusterControl, the DBA team quickly deployed a production-ready Galera cluster in minutes instead of hours, eliminating previous configuration errors. The solution provided automatic failover, centralized monitoring, and backup capabilities, giving the team confidence to run MySQL in a production environment. This success was so significant that MySQL became their second preferred database technology, displacing Oracle, and the company plans to expand its use of open-source databases with ClusterControl to reduce overall project costs while ensuring performance and uptime.

Black Hills Corporation

Jordan Marshall

DBA Manager