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Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group
Auto group drives down costs with database migration and increases performance
​​​Business Situation
When the Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group’s business critical application experienced performance issues it threatened online sales and customer satisfaction.
The application, which ran on an Oracle Database 10g platform, puts “product on the shelf” for online customers. If customers’ queries against the Rate Engine database are not returned within a certain time limit, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group can’t make a sale.  The company faced a decision: either add additional UNIX hardware and upgrade its Oracle software, or migrate to another database platform.
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​Solution
Avanade helped Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group see the value of migrating to a Microsoft database solution through an initial Rate Engine platform assessment. Instead of investing a lot of money in Oracle licenses and UNIX hardware, Avanade helped the company improve the performance, capacity and reliability of its Rate Engine on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise so that it runs at a much lower cost. Avanade also optimised the database’s performance and reconfigured the solution to boost business continuity, deploying two servers in a mirrored configuration that uses a storage area network (SAN) solution. The new implementation is an active/passive cluster with only one active server handling the entire workload. The other is a passive mirror, available to handle automatic failover.  All this was accomplished in just four months before the busy summer car rental season.
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​Results
Avanade re-architected the data service to support SQL Server 2008 and fine-tuned the database to improve the application's performance so that it returns rental rates to online customers faster.  This solution leverages a smaller hardware footprint, adds high availability and costs less than expanding the existing Oracle solution. The migration saved Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group several hundred thousand dollars in UNIX hardware and Oracle software costs and saves $175,000 annually in maintenance costs. The new Rate Engine application took only one year to achieve a 100 percent return on investment. Today, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group has a cost-effective solution it can easily scale for other business ventures.
begin quotation   We needed the A-team to bring this critical infrastructure online. During the assessment, it was clear that Avanade could rise to the challenge.  end quotation Rick Morris Chief Information Officer, Dollar Thrifty Auto Group
 
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