Improving Uptime by Migrating Business Critical Databases to the Cloud

Background

Mortgage Cadence’s enterprise lending SaaS solutions provide data-driven automation tools to mortgage banks, lenders, service providers and servicers. The company’s solutions integrate all functions and data elements required to optimize, manage and score lending performance. Providing an evolving, open lending platform gives financial institutions the flexibility it needs to meet the constantly-changing demands of the mortgage industry and minimize risks.

The increased regulatory scrutiny has prompted banks to take a long look at moving away from in-house and or disparate origination solutions and towards enterprise lending solutions to reduce costs associated with software and infrastructure and increase compliance/data security measures. Mortgage Cadence’s SaaS solutions have quickly emerged as best-in-class and are experiencing exponential growth.

Mortgage Cadence previously deployed a dedicated environment with no virtualization layer. The core architecture consisted of multiple web servers with a SQL Server backend. Its physical servers were running with an appliance load balancer in front of them. With 30% of its infrastructure database-related, Mortgage Cadence database sizes ranged from 5GB to 150GB, with individual servers ranging from 1 proc and 2GB of RAM to 8 proc and 32GB of RAM. Rapid scalability was quickly becoming a concern due to the exponential increase in Mortgage Cadence customers.

Challenge

Mortgage Cadence used its own physical servers to roll out various product offerings to its customers, but rapid business growth required the company to put too many customer loads on these servers. As a result, the dedicated environment was proving to not be a long term solution and the company needed to consider an alternative approach.

Testing virtualization internally with some of its back-office applications, the results were less than promising (Mortgage Cadence saw 30-40% degradation in performance). Subsequently, its comfort in moving customer-facing products to a virtualized environment, let alone cloud, was extremely low. However; Mortgage Cadence was determined to test other virtualization technologies due to the benefits rapid scalability could provide them. The company then compared VMware virtualization running SQL Server 2008 to a physical server and the average performance degradation was only 5%. In some instances, Mortgage Cadence found applications ran faster in the virtualized environment.

Those results led Mortgage Cadence to consider virtualizing its entire product line.  “At that point, it didn’t make any sense to stick with our physical servers,” said Jeff Gelina, Vice President of IT at Mortgage Cadence. “The level of performance degradation was negligible when weighing it against the positive attributes of virtualization. The decision to move our entire product line to the cloud was a no-brainer. It was a change we had to make to better service our clients.”

Solution

Mortgage Cadence had a relationship with another hosting provider; however, approached Hosting.com to improve its network uptime and gain the level of availability and scalability it needed to meet its changing database demands. “Hosting.com provided unparalleled service and product offerings that are second to none,” said Gelina. “They brought the level of expertise we needed to make the necessary transition from our dedicated environment to the cloud.”

Mortgage Cadence leveraged Hosting.com’s Cloud Enterprise virtualization technology, along with a mix of data platforms that included Microsoft Express, SQL Web Edition, SQL Standard and SQL Enterprise. Hosting.com manages the provisioning engine and Mortgage Cadence can easily add resources as necessary to its cloud environment through Hosting.com’s Customer Portal. Mortgage Cadence can now run SQL Server on multiple hosts and has the ability to move back and forth between hosts, easily duplicate its products, and grow its infrastructure dynamically, without downtime, and purchase Microsoft licensing through an amortized agreement that Hosting.com has with Microsoft.

Mortgage Cadence also chose Hosting.com because of Hosting.com’s ability to provide a reporting solution for compliancy audits utilizing Alert Logic and replication between multiple Hosting.com sites for disaster recovery; and to meet regulatory requirements of its end-users. Mortgage Cadence has a geographically dispersed active/active loan processing operations satisfying even the most scrutinized disaster recovery concerns. The inter-connected backbone and hybrid replication solution between the two Hosting.com datacenters enables Mortgage Cadence to automatically fail over in the event of a clinical or natural disaster limiting its downtime to less than one hour. 

In addition, unlike typical replication solutions, by leveraging Hosting.com’s Cloud Enterprise Parking technology, Mortgage Cadence can turn off the majority of servers (except the databases) when not in use and pay a fraction of the cost of typical replication solutions while maintaining a high level of data protection and application availability.

Results

Moving 100% of its database infrastructure to the cloud has allowed Mortgage Cadence to re-architect its business critical applications to completely eliminate downtime issues. Mortgage Cadence didn’t just experiment with cloud – it moved 100% of its database infrastructure to the Hosting.com Cloud.

Since the migration, Mortgage Cadence has achieved 100% of its uptime SLAs and increased its network uptime significantly; thus, providing a better customer experience. “At the end of the day, we chose to move our critical business applications to the cloud to eliminate downtime. We have achieved that goal,” said Gelina. “Previously, we were concerned with how our network and infrastructure would handle new client loads – now, infrastructure isn’t a concern when bringing on new clients.”

Mortgage Cadence also deployed a robust security cloud solution using Alert Logic, enterprise-class technologies and other Hosting.com services to meet its security requirements.  In addition, they have found that resource predictability within a cloud environment can help them better understand and predict its monthly operating expenses.

“Before virtualizing our product line, it was difficult to understand our total infrastructure costs and allocate for the resources necessary to support clients. Our cloud solution allows us to grow quickly and understand our monthly costs,” added Gelina. As a SaaS provider, this gives Mortgage Cadence the ability to understand its monthly margins and make adjustments, accordingly. The cloud is saving Mortgage Cadence dollars and helping to ensure it is profitable in delivering its enterprise lending services.  “Most importantly, we are delivering a world class customer experience to our clients and their customers,” concluded Gelina.