High-tech Company Reduces MTTR with Visibility into Virtualized & Cloud Environments

Customer Profile

This 25-year-old high-tech company, with more than $5 billion in revenue, is a leader in providing systems and services to store, manage, and protect data. More than 100,000 employees in 100 offices worldwide support major cloud providers, Fortune 500 enterprises, and Global 200 service providers, as the company evolved their IT environments and implemented digital transformation technologies. As a leading IT provider, the efficient operation of their own application services is a priority.

The Challenge

Although a leader in technology, this high-tech company is like most enterprises, with frustrations assuring quality performance of some of their services as they introduce their own digital transformations. At one point recently, the head of data center operations and lead network engineer were wrestling with a few issues:

• They were experiencing frustrating issues with their unified communications deployment that were difficult to pinpoint and were impacting their user community
• Several legacy packet brokers were outdated and upgrading that product’s features and capabilities would require complete replacement
• They work with several market-leading public cloud partners to provide solutions to customers, and in trying to deliver the highest-quality customer experience found themselves lacking visibility into the virtualized servers and the east-west traffic in these environments

Any one of these projects would require a commitment in time for vendor and solution analysis, as well as for budget justification and authorization. Any way they could possibly combine these projects would accelerate the return on investment in time and cost.

Solution in Action

Several members of the IT team came together to define the scope of visibility and service assurance required to meet all their objectives. Following an in-depth evaluation, they selected NETSCOUT® with the unique ability to address all their requirements:

• nGeniusONE service assurance solution for protecting performance of their voice and data applications
• vSTREAM virtual appliance to support visibility into digital transformation across VMware virtualized environments in their data centers and Amazon AWS environments
• nGenius 5000 packet flow switches for providing access to packet data for their monitoring needs

They have deployed the solution in a few on-premises and cloud data centers around the world. The software based, commercial-off-the-shelf nGenius 5000 series packet flow switches are being used to aggregate and/or forward network packet data to downstream monitoring tools.

Virtual nGeniusONE is leveraging smart data from the vSTREAMs for visibility and service assurance analysis of their data and voice applications. By implementing vSTREAMs in the VMware virtualized environment, the data center management and operations teams are gaining much-needed insights into issues with Web-based applications, as well as the critical storage apps – iSCSI and NFS. The voice team is going to leverage the same nGeniusONE views and workflows to troubleshoot issues with their UC services, with the ability to analyze both voice media and call signaling protocols.

The Results

At the beginning of the project, the IT team was looking at three separate initiatives, and as they involved NETSCOUT, they learned that they could turn this into a single project with a single vendor for all their visibility and service assurance requirements. This not only minimizes vendor complexity and provides for a better integrated overall solution, but it is also more cost effective for streamlining initial investments and ongoing training and maintenance costs.

A primary goal was to gain service assurance with visibility into both their voice and business data services. They achieved this goal with the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and will improve overall IT productivity and partner collaboration with the voice team, network operations, and data center management teams all using the same screens and contextual workflows to pinpoint and resolve issues quickly. The single-pane-of-glass views for voice and data simultaneously represent a unique, key advantage of the nGeniusONE solution!

The operations teams are benefiting from visibility in areas they did not have previously, their virtualized environment and cloud partner data centers, which is allowing them to accurately and quickly identify the source of problems across the overall private and public cloud environments. This ultimately allows them to maintain high-quality delivery of services to their customers and end users.

Finally, they are reaping the benefits of more cost-effective ways to deploy visibility in the form of COTS, for nGenius packet flow switches, and virtualized appliances, like vSTREAM. This savings could not have been more compelling then when the IT and Finance teams realized the investment for the upgraded, feature-rich nGenius 5000 series packet flow switch was the same as the ongoing maintenance on their existing legacy, outdated packet broker. Furthermore, future maintenance is far more affordable on the nGenius 5000 PFS as well. This makes better use of limited budgets while enabling their cap-ex dollar go farther for their service assurance needs, today and in the future.