Case Study

High-Tech Leader Assures Lift-and- Shift Cloud Application Migration With NETSCOUT Visibility

Cloud Application Migration With NETSCOUT

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Enterprise private-to-public cloud migration and lift-and-shift application migration requiring visibility 
  • Expanding PFS deployment for Security team use at global data centers 
 The Solution 
  • Expanded nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform enterprise licensing 
  • vSTREAM™ virtual appliance 
  • nGenius® Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software 
 The Results 
  • Successfully transitioned application workloads, deployed new business services on multi-cloud 
  • Enhanced security tool performance through regional team access to global packet broker rollout 

Customer Profile

This high-tech company is a market leader in providing innovative data storage, management, and protection solutions to Fortune 500 enterprises, Global 200 service providers, and worldwide customers. Growing organically and through strategic acquisition enabled the company to supplement their service portfolio to include data synchronization, compliance, and backup solutions. 

Delivering data delivery services on this scale depends on the collective efforts of more than 10,000 employees working in 100 global offices, including business hubs and data center operations. 

The company is a NETSCOUT® customer, with their information technology (IT) team using vSTREAM virtual appliances to bring visibility into their private cloud infrastructure and nGeniusONE to provide troubleshooting of their customer support website. The company also uses software-based nGenius 5000 series packet flow switch (PFS) technology to provide network packet data access for their IT troubleshooting and forensic analysis needs. With this NETSCOUT visibility approach, the IT team uses the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to identify application performance issues impacting service delivery quality, such as TCP errors and retransmissions. 

The Challenge

With the company’s success based on the ability to stay ahead of trends in the data storage market, they have supplemented their own private cloud solutions with multi-cloud offerings involving strategic partners like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. 

Recognizing the increased operational efficiencies and reduced operating expenses offered by these proven solutions, IT leadership began rethinking their own enterprise cloud strategy to transition from a private cloud solution to one factoring multi-cloud providers. From their experience supporting customers with these very requirements, IT recognized successfully transitioning from public to multi-cloud would require strategic planning that factored: 

  • What visibility would be needed 
  • Where visibility would be needed to see applications 
  • Monitoring of applications that were moving to the public cloud to assure performance was not adversely impacted by lift-and-shift activities 

Another technical initiative facing the IT team involved offering improved access to network packets for the IT Security team for use with downstream security tools being used at company global data centers. With the NETSCOUT PFS technology already deployed for the IT team providing easy access to network packets and reliable packet broker operation, leadership was faced with a decision whether to expand the NETSCOUT footprint across global data center operations for Security team use, which meant displacing legacy PFS investments across those locations.

Solution in Action

The IT leadership team addressed these collective public cloud visibility, lift-and-shift application monitoring, and global packet broker deployment requirements by extending their investment in NETSCOUT technology to include: 

  • nGeniusONE license upgrade to accommodate additional IT users tasked with monitoring applications running in the multi-cloud environment 
  • vSTREAM virtual appliances deployed in the multi-cloud infrastructure, bringing necessary visibility into lift-and-shift application performance across AWS 
  • nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software for NETSCOUT Certified PFS appliances 

nGeniusONE pulls information from all deployment locations for dashboards, workflows and reports that provide both a macro global view of activity, health, and performance, to micro views of regions, workloads, and service dependency views. The IT team is working collaboratively with AWS, based on evidence provided by nGeniusONE and vSTREAMs to best optimize service delivery for their clients. 

The Results

The IT leadership team moved ahead with confidence with the enterprise application migration to a multi-cloud environment, using nGeniusONE and vSTREAM technology that had already proven performance in the public cloud environment to visualize application workloads being transitioned to AWS and Azure. 

The Security team likewise enjoyed the benefit of real-world deployment of NETSCOUT PFOS across the company’s global locations, with these software-based PFS appliances offering reliable performance and ease of access to network packets for downstream security tool use. 

Moving ahead with an expanded NETSCOUT technology rollout also offered the following benefits to company leadership: 

  • Reduced capital expenses with a software‑based approach for nGeniusONE, PFS, and vSTREAM technology 
  • Lower operating expenses with a single‑vendor approach to service assurance, cloud visibility, and packet broker technology 
  • Fewer vendor tools to manage and support across global data center operations