Solution brief Technology company looks to modernize their monitoring application with AWS and Microsoft workloads
By Insight Editor / 23 Dec 2019
TwinEngines is a technology company that makes devices responsible for monitoring power supplies in everyday electronics and machines. Their products cover everything from ATM machines to car charging stations to vending machines. When producing electronics and power supplies, safety is of the utmost importance, in order to prevent hazards such as power surges, overloads or fires.
The TwinEngines application provides real-time monitoring of power supplies in order to provide preventive maintenance, real time monitoring, and recommendations for enhancements. This application has been so successful that Honda acquired TwinEngines in order to more broadly apply this innovation to Honda technologies globally. In order to expand on a global scale, TwinEngines realized that they were due fora technology review and an upgrade to their applications architecture and infrastructure
The Challenge
As TwinEngines assessed the steps they would need to take in order to position themselves as a global competitor and as part of the Honda ecosystem, they determined some pain points that they needed to address.
These included the need for:
- A highly available and scalable solution to span global customers and growth
- Security for their network and infrastructure
- The capacity to add additional features and capabilities as needed
- The ability to perform upgrades and enhancements that minimize customer downtime and preserve their reputation for availability and performance
Many of these needs were identified during the corporate acquisition by Honda, as Honda worked with TwinEngines to consolidate infrastructures and resources.
TwinEngines was aware of Insight's reputation in professional services, so they reached out for assistance. Insight allocated a team of engineers and architect experts in AWS and Microsoft solutions. As part of their assessment and planning activities, they worked with TwinEngine’s application development team to run testing and to identify gaps against established security protocols.
Insight also reviewed and assessed TwinEngine’s backend architecture. One of the pain points they identified was the need for clustering, autoscaling, and high availability, so they recommended that TwinEngines upgrade to SQL Server 2016 from SQL Server 2003, which was also appropriate as SQL Server 2003 had gone End of Support. Insight also assessed TwinEngine’s readiness for a move to AWS, and advised on the best practices and steps needed to pursue this upgrade with zero customer impact.
The Solution
Post-assessment, the Insight professional services team worked with TwinEngines to scope out the needed activities and start working on their plan.
First on the priority items list was upgrading their network and architecture to modern technology solutions. Insight upgraded SQL Server 2003 to SQL Server 2016, which enabled TwinEngines to take advantage of new database clustering and autoscaling capabilities. This upgrade also allowed the application to seamlessly scale up and down depending on the application workload, while also allowing the customer to control costs, as the application does need to run constantly. This flexibility helps support global scale, which was vital as TwinEngines needed to mirror Honda’s much larger scale.
The Insight services team then focused their activities to the performance issues of the TwinEngines legacy systems. One of the issues was the need for high availability and autoscaling. To provide the level of availability that TwinEngines customers need, Insight added availability to Zone 2, and also adding disaster recovery (DR) to a third zone. In order to control costs for these additions, Insight and TwinEngines decided that half of the DR site would be a cold backup, while the other half would be a warm backup. Insight delivered additional improvements to performance, reliability and scalability with a load balancer, which allows the back end of the application to properly scale and allocate workloads to available resources as customers register more devices and application traffic increases.
Insight also added enhancements and protocols designed to protect all levels of the applications and the overall network architecture from service disruptions. This was vital for safety and information security, since TwinEngines monitoring covers devices such as ATMs, elevators, and medical equipment.
The Results
As a result of these upgrades and enhancements, Honda and TwinEngines are now able to deliver a best-in-class monitoring application that is fully integrated into Honda's global ecosystem. Their customers trust that their power supplies are fully monitored and protected in real time.
