SQL Server High Availability for Kronos Workforce Central Suite

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The Kronos® Workforce Central® suite provides the end-to-end solution to help your company executives, supervisors, and employees excel in all areas of workforce management. Workforce Central automates your labor-intensive administrative processes, freeing your workforce to focus on productivity and quality.

Sounds great but what happens if Kronos is down?

As a DBA one of your primary responsibilities is to ensure that this does not happen.  When you talk to most DBAs they are worried about the CIA.

Not THAT CIA… but rather:

  • Confidentiality
  • Integrity
  • Availability

In this post we’re going to talk about Availability and what you can do as a DBA to ensure you meet your RPO and RTOs and minimize downtime and maximize your 9’s.  If you caught all of that than chances are this is not your first look at high availability.  For those who are just investigating high availability for the first time let’s review:

  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective) – This is how much data you are willing to lose and manually re-enter in the event of failure
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective) – This is the amount of time you are willing to be down before the impact to the business is too much
  • Downtime – The amount of time that the database system is unable to perform work on behalf of your application.
  • 9’s (nines) – Nines is a term that is used in the context of determining the degree of availability you want your systems to have.

So what High Availability Options are available for the Kronos® Workforce Central® suite?

High Availability Option Description Edition
Log Shipping The process of automating the backup of database and transaction log files on a SQL Server instance and then restoring them onto a standby SQL Server instance Enterprise Standard Workgroup Web
Resource Governor Resource Governor is an application you can use to restrict the amount of CPU and memory that queries are able to take from SQL Server. Resource Governor is a great option if you can “tag” connections to SQL Server that you know may consume resources that would take away from higher priority workloads. Enterprise
Clustering A cluster is simply one or more computers that are logically thought of as being in a “clustered” relationship. Logically speaking, a single computer is a cluster of one. When you add a second computer, things get more interesting. A cluster typically means that the computer(s) that are part of the cluster are working for some common purpose Enterprise (16-node failover clustering) Standard (2-node failover clustering)
* Database Mirroring The database can be mirrored from one SQL Server instance to another SQL Server instance. The source instance is called Principal server; the target instance is called Mirrored server. You can also have another instance called the Witness Enterprise Standard (Single Threaded, Safety Full Only) Workgroup, Web, and Express (Witness Only)

* Kronos has not tested or certified Workforce Central with this option. However, Kronos has not identified any technical reasons why this would cause problems for Workforce Central. If you’re considering this High Availability option work with your Kronos support team to address any questions you may have.

Now what solution(s) you go with will all depend on what your tolerance is for data loss and downtime.  If you don’t have an established SLA (Service Level Agreement) these questions need to be asked and answered in order for you to be able to recommend a high availability solution for your SQL Server environment for Kronos® Workforce Central® suite.

Check out the High Availability Options for Kronos Workforce Central Suite on SQL Server whitepaper for more information.