Summary
A leading global telecom service provider was suffering from slowdowns. On the recommendation of one of their largest clients, they implemented Vityl Capacity Management (VCM) on a trial basis to investigate.
Using the VCM solution, they were immediately able to zero-in on the cause. They addressed the constraint, and consistent service delivery was restored. As a result of that successful trial, the company adopted VCM and now utilizes it in many other areas of the enterprise. Read on for more details into their VCM success story.
Managing A Growing Hardware Environment
The basic technology architecture at this communications service provider is a web layer, an application layer, and an Oracle database layer. UNIX servers are utilized in a clustered environment, and multiple applications reside on each server. Load balancing and redundancy is employed to optimize performance and minimize downtime. The company has also introduced Dell commodity boxes, as well as Red Hat Linux OS.
In the past, the company primarily relied on the “buy more Hardware” philosophy as a solution to all problems, and any capacity planning was done manually using spreadsheets.
“We were in ‘react’ mode and had no time for analysis,” said the IT manager. “Capacity growth was based on estimates of new customer volume and a general approach of over-engineering to keep the pager from going off.”
Whenever a problem cropped up, the IT manager had to go to application experts to find out what might be happening. This, however, led to many different opinions.
Analyzing Performance Issues with VCM
When new applications came online, growth rates over the next six or twelve months were largely unknown. By overbuilding, the company paid heavily for unutilized resources (CPU, memory or disk), not to mention all of the other associated costs. Further, many application support teams had been developing performance interfaces without standardization. What initially led the organization to VCM was an issue with an application.
“We observed some capacity issues on an Oracle database server,” said the IT manager. “We had a large number of records to process and the database couldn’t keep up with the demand.”
The company services well-known names in the telecommunications space, and one key customer recommended the VCM solution to help analyze ongoing performance issues during a customer review.
“This telecommunication giant had integrated VCM into its IT culture,” said the IT manager. “That indicated to me right away that there had to be something there that we could gain value from.”
He immediately obtained a trial of VCM. But instead of using it in a small-scale test environment, he put it to work to address the problems. He did a proof of concept of VCM on the application and it pinpointed an IO issue. Based on the results of that trial in a real-world situation, the company decided to move forward and buy VCM.
Solving Bottlenecks with VCM
The organization initially used VCM to model workloads connecting with this application and its Oracle database. As soon as the IO bottleneck was discovered, the solution became obvious. Modeling revealed that increasing the number of paths to disk would alleviate any IO constraints. Accordingly, the company made the necessary disk allocation improvements, RAID upgrades and path additions to help bring about the processing of far more transactions.
By providing four paths to the SAN over 4 Gig connections, adding a more powerful UNIX server for the database and additional disk-based storage, all slowdowns were eliminated. While that effectively ended any concerns with that application, IT continued to use VCM to monitor this mission-critical aspect of its service portfolio.
“By staying on top of that application for another ten months, VCM told us that we had a developing CPU capacity issue,” said the IT manager. “That led us in the direction of making a substantial CPU upgrade on our Oracle database server.”
“VCM has become an invaluable addition to our toolset. It makes it easy to anticipate bottlenecks and cope with rapid growth by allowing us to determine the necessary improvements to our systems.”
High Level of Support from VCM
After two years of service from VCM, how has the IT manager found the level of service and support available from the company?
“Support has been awesome as people are always available to help me gain full value from the software,” said the IT manager. “It is clearly a committed vendor.”
The results from VCM have spread around the company. Its German and UK data centers have adopted it. Further, the company has now adjusted its acquisition process.
“Corporate finance won’t sign off on a hardware acquisition without a VCM analysis model,” said the IT manager.
Get a Live Demonstration of VCM Software
See for yourself how VCM can help your organization avoid downtime, mitigate risk, and keep costs down.