Bio-Tech Company Accelerates Roll-Out of New Data Center Architecture

Customer Profile

This biotech company is a global leader who develops agricultural innovations, implements productive, sustainable products and practices, and improves quality and yields for food growers. Their success is achieved through a strong supply chain system around the world. The company manages multiple core business units that employ over 25,000 people in 90 countries at over 500 remote locations. With such a breath of operating divisions, regions, languages, and specialties, IT manages an extremely complex network supporting a vast array of applications and services.

The Challenge

Many of the business applications and services used by employees and partners of this biotech were hosted by 3rd party SaaS vendors. Over time, this resulted in high costs and lack of control for the IT division. The decision was made to implement a performance hub project for their hundreds of remote locations. They are using Cisco® Secure Agile Exchange (SAE), which enables enterprises to interconnect users to applications quickly and securely by virtualizing the network edge (DMZ) and extending it to colocation centers. All the 3rd party applications, as well as some applications hosted at internal data centers, were brought “in-house” to 10-15 colocation facilities and all the company remote locations will point to these colocations.

A key goal of the project was to ensure the SaaS and internal applications were available to end users after the move to the colocation centers. IT knew they needed visibility from the user perspective, to ensure the new approach was working as designed with high-quality application availability and performance. Bringing the visibility in-house was key to ensuring a successful roll‑out of the new architecture and approach.

Solution in Action

The company selected NETSCOUT® nGeniusPULSE for synthetic monitoring of the business applications. Hardware nPoints were deployed in the remote sites, beginning with 100 critical locations. Virtual nPoints are being deployed in the colocation centers and in various AWS and Azure zones for testing access to public-facing applications and SaaS applications to make sure those applications are available externally. The nPoints run Web Tests on the SaaS applications for hop-byhop path analysis to reveal if there is any latency and isolate if the cause is due to the application or the network. The tests can be run throughout the day, even when no one is on the system, to identify availability and performance problems before users are impacted. By using Business Transaction Tests (BTT), automated tests which actively execute user actions within an application, the IT staff at the company gains trended information to develop benchmarks for specific actions and to pinpoint precisely where in the application delays are occurring.

This bio-tech company also selected nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) as an important component in ensuring the success of this critical roll-out. The NETSCOUT nVaaS team of experts provides a high level of support, including assisting the company’s IT team with solution configurations and creation of scripts for BTT tests. With nVaaS, the company has 24x7 troubleshooting that is delivered with actionable insights to improve performance for end users. The executive team receives reports designed to convey the metrics they need to confirm the new architecture is working as designed and highlighting areas that need improvement.

The Results

With the help of NETSCOUT solutions and services, the company was able to accelerate migration to the new architecture. They have the visibility across the network, applications, and colocations needed to ensure their end users’ seamless access to applications during and after the migration. The troubleshooting and insights from the nVaaS team have reduced the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) issues. Relying on the high level of service from the nVaaS team has enabled their IT team to focus on other strategic priories, increasing their efficiency. Having the data from NETSCOUT has improved their ability to work collaboratively with the colocation vendors.