Growing Agricultural Company Gets to Root of Successful Co-Lo Migration With NETSCOUT Visibility

Customer Profile

This global agricultural company has roots extending back nearly a century. With 4,000+ employees and customers in more than 60 countries, the company’s products include food consumed by millions every day. 

While maintaining their business focus on products sold in restaurants and markets, the company’s portfolio has expanded to include food manufacturing, farming, ranching, retail stores, and other agricultural interests. 

This innovative company also plays a leading role in the emerging digital farming/agricultural market space. 

The Challenge

The company’s acquisition of another agricultural business located continents away offered the commercial benefits of expanded market reach and production capacity. However, the acquisition also presented new information technology (IT) demands that needed to be addressed quickly. For example: 

• The acquired company’s IT operations were managed by Help Desk resources and local technicians unequipped to meet the expanding monitoring demands of this now-global company. 
• Wanting to reduce rather than expand their data center operations footprint, the decision was made migrate the acquired company’s business services into a regional Equinix co-lo facility. While this decision offered efficiencies and cost containment to the company, the Equinix site had not yet been instrumented for real-time monitoring of the transitioning agricultural business services. 
• The parent company needed to assure business and service continuity before, during, and after the data center migration and required visibility and performance analytics to do so. 

The parent company was a long-time NETSCOUT^® customer, relying on nGeniusONE for U.S. data center and remote site monitoring using NetFlow-based MIB2 data. The corporate Network Administration team wanted to bring visibility quickly and economically into the remote Equinix-based data center, while simultaneously expanding real-time monitoring of an evolving application suite that included: 

• SAP and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business services 
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms 
• Increased use of Unified Communications (UC) technology 

These collective business demands prompted the company to revisit their visibility requirements, as well as their investment in the deployed NETSCOUT solution to determine its viability in handling new data center visibility and monitoring demands.

Solution in Action

The company is gaining necessary real-time views and monitoring of global agricultural business services by standardizing on NETSCOUT’s smart visibility technology across the business. The corporate IT team now has eyes on this expanded network and global data center operations by deploying InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) and nGenius packet flow switch (PFS) technology. IT continues to realize the value of accessing NetFlow data for remote site monitoring by using NETSCOUT nGenius Collector technology to capture MIB2 analytics, with this data integrated as part of the smart data fueling nGeniusONE performance analytics. 

The corporate IT team realized early returns from their new investment by using nGeniusONE for real-time monitoring of their expanded network, accessing analytics to troubleshoot potential issues involving network enablers (e.g., DNS, TACACS) before they adversely impacted business applications. 

The Results

The company’s renewed commitment to NETSCOUT technology brings benefits to this growing agricultural business, such as: 

• Assured performance of the business services migrated to the Equinix co-lo, by using nGeniusONE to monitor data center performance against negotiated service level agreements 
• Centralized IT operations, with U.S.-based resources monitoring performance of globally deployed applications 
• Expanded reliability of SaaS platforms and critical business services running on SAP and ERP platforms 
• Increased business adoption of nGeniusONE as the IT monitoring platform of choice (e.g., UC team assuring Voice over IP services)