A 1991 manufacturer, running on AWS

About customer:

Established in 1991, Matrix is a leader in Security and Telecom solutions for modern businesses and enterprises. As an innovative, technology driven and customer focused organization, the company is committed to keeping pace with the revolutions in the Security and Telecom industries. With around 40% of its human resources dedicated to the development of new products, Matrix has launched cutting-edge products like Video Surveillance Systems – Video Management System, Network Video Recorder and IP Camera, Access Control and Time-Attendance Systems as well as Telecom Solutions such as Unified Communications, IP-PBX, Universal Gateways, VoIP and GSM Gateways and Communication Endpoints. These solutions are feature-rich, reliable and conform to international standards. Having global footprints in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Africa through an extensive network of more than 2,500 channel partners, Matrix ensures that the products serve the needs of its customers faster and longer. Matrix has gained trust and admiration of customers representing the entire spectrum of industries. Matrix has won many international awards for its innovative products.

All Matrix products are indigenously designed. With around 30% of the total manpower dedicated to development of new products, Matrix R&D is the foundation of its growth and sustenance. Matrix R&D is located at its corporate office and is spread over an area of 77,000 sq. ft. The R&D team designs products conforming to the relevant international standards. Matrix makes considerable investment in R&D tools and equipment to stay abreast with the latest technological advancements.

Challenges

• Matrix ComSec is one of the leading manufacturers for various indigenously designed attendance machines. The application for attendance machines is a SaaS offering for all customers.
• To send data from attendance devices to Windows applications was a big challenge and customer always needed to upgrade bandwidth at extra cost and effort. Even sending data to the Windows device server was causing high latency issues.
• This led to downtime and poor customer experience.
• To maintain and manage DR cost for windows applications with 5 Minutes RPO and 1 hour RTO was too costly and troublesome to manage.
• Final goal was to adopt a dynamic and horizontal scale in the Windows environment with cloud to optimize cost with highest performance.
• Windows SQL license needed cost optimization, as iit required very high memory compared to CPU.
• Also needed industrial standard stability, Security, Availability, flexibility for their future innovation in their products.
• Windows Application Migration to AWS without much downtime.

Solution to Meet Challenges

• Primary Region selected as Mumbai with windows applications.
• Two tier architecture windows solution adopted to best suited existing workload.
• 2 public subnet, 2 windows Web/App private subnet and 2 MSSQL DB private subnet created in one VPC.
• Bastion-SSL VPN server, Network load balancer, NGW are in public subnet
• Windows Application and Windows Device servers are in private subnet
• MSSQL database is in db private subnet
• Network Load Balancer helps to resolve the latency issue in device to windows device server communication. It also resolves custom tcp port connectivity from device to windows device servers.
• Every 5 minutes SQL Database AMI will be created and moved to the Ohio region for DR. This will be achieved with custom Lambda.
• Almost for the same compute size for windows workload it is observed that performance increases substantially with good security and stability
• Cost reduction achieved with windows MSSQL deployed on X1e 4 cpu and 122 GB memory. Hence lots of cost savings for MSSQL windows licenses.

Outcomes

• This began as a POC project and it was extremely successful.
• All latency related issues with Windows device server solved as such best cloud infrastructure with AWS and Network Load Balancer usage.
• MSSQL cost optimization achieved with X1e high memory instance.
• Windows application and MSSQL DR was achieved with minimum effort and with most automation.
• Windows application and MSSQL DR management and maintenance costs are highly optimized.
• All AWS security best practices for windows workload were adopted so the solution is stable and secured.

Conclusion

Successfully migrated and deployed windows EC2 solution using majority on .Net application, MSSQL, IIS web server etc.

AWS had created a video with Matrix ComSec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxN_-wbn2M