Customers
Customers Relying On Virtual Instruments SAN and Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solutions
See how some of our customers in multiple sectors are rapidly improving the performance, availability and utilization of their IT infrastructures by proactively locating, diagnosing and preventing SAN-related issues.
Leading Global 2000 companies and government entities trust Virtual Instruments as their partner in reducing storage related management and acquisition costs while simultaneously eliminating the risks of application downtime. Read about customer successes or view a customer video to learn more about the IT and business benefits of VirtualWisdom.
Finance and Insurance
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Customer Case Studies
Raymond James
Like many IT shops, Raymond James is challenged with tight budgets and with getting more and more performance out of existing hardware assets and personnel. The SAN team’s success is measured by a simple metric: keep the data available; no excuses. So taking a purely reactive approach to SAN troubleshooting and performance optimization was out of the question.
After their 2008 deployment of VirtualWisdom, causes of potential application slow-downs are identified and corrective action taken before users are even aware of a problem, and they have seen a reduction in the need to replace suspected bad SAN components because of superior fault diagnosis, which saves on both CAPEX and OPEX.
Halifax Bank of Scotland
Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) uses Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom monitoring tools to help manage its ever-expanding Storage Area Network (SAN).
With more than 22 million customers, HBOS has a relationship with two out of every five UK households. And HBOS takes its customer relationships very seriously. It prides itself on its ability to deliver new products and customer support services that are second to none. Part of this commitment entails a massive information technology infrastructure that helps ensure that customers have access to all of the information and banking services they might be seeking—available 24 x 7. VirtualWisdom is a key component.
Read the full case study »
View the video success story »
BarclayCard
Ryan Perkowski, SAN Manager at Barclaycard US, presented at the 2009 Fall SNW conference on “Controlling SAN Costs: Best Practices for Optimizing SAN Performance & Utilization.” Ryan discusses:
- The storage environment at Barclaycard US
- How to overcome the challenges of managing a large SAN
- The reasons the organization relies on VirtualWisdom
See the full presentation »
Listen to podcast of Ryan’s Wikibon Peer Incite interview »
Groupama Asset Management
Groupama’s Alain Boggero, IT Manager based in France, discussed his experiences with VirtualWisdom at the CRIP/ITI Forum annual conference in Paris on June 17, 2010. Alain discusses (in French):
- Background on Groupama & their data center infrastructure
- The capabilities and benefits of Virtual Instruments
North America Financial Institution
Established over 100 years ago, this Financial Group serves more than 7 million personal, commercial, corporate and institutional customers in North America and internationally. The customer engaged with Virtual Instruments through a SAN Health Assessment to help find multiple SAN-related problems, remediate them, and just as importantly, provide guidance to help prevent similar problems from recurring in the future.
Global Financial Institution
Because this institution considers IT to be a competitive edge, there is pressure to not only maintain superior customer-facing application performance and overall high application availability, but also to deploy the newest technologies quickly. Existing measurement tools and testing methodologies were simply not up to the challenge of optimizing existing applications, improving customer service, and making technology leaps all at the same time.
VirtualWisdom is an indispensable SAN optimization tool. It’s been used to troubleshoot large data warehouse performance issues, solve an SRDF replication issue, verify new vendor’s marketing claims, test various configuration settings for a new OS platform, and even monitor for failing SFPs. VirtualWisdom has enabled accelerated deployments by providing real-time visibility to rollouts; to ensure that all is performing as expected, with no mis-configurations or version incompatibilities.
Read the full case study »
Read what the Wikibon analysts say about VirtualWisdom’s use at this leading financial institution »
International Brokerage Firm
This financial management and advisory firm is a leading provider of global corporate and investment banking services, including commercial lending, global high-yield debt, global equity, and global M&A. Customer service and responsiveness are hallmarks of the firm, which means their IT infrastructure must be one of the most reliable in the world.
Since implementing VirtualWisdom SAN Availabity Probe software to monitor their SAN, they gained tremendous visibility into their infrastructure that was not available previously. Diagnosing problems became much easier and faster, ultimately improving overall service to their user community.
Large Financial Services Company
Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom solution, VirtualWisdom Virtual Server Probe, and Virtual Infrastructure Optimization and Best Practices Services helped this leading financial services company pinpoint the sources of performance issues and enable fast resolution. VirtualWisdom products and services helped the IT team drive VMware ESX/ESXi virtual machines and servers into full production and increase server consolidation ratios.
Moving forward the company’s application, storage, and VMware IT groups now have the confidence that they can meet new business requirements in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
Healthcare
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Customer Case Studies
Hospital
In one of the leading pediatric hospitals and research facilities in the world, Virtual Instrument's VirtualWisdom® software, hardware, and services enable the IT department to increase productivity, reduce capital expenditures, improve provisioning, and discover SAN related problems before they cause outages.
JPS Health Network
To optimize budget and resources, this health care provider uses VMware server virtualization and storage virtualization with an HDS USP-V storage system. One of their challenges is to maintain high SLAs in the face of 40% yearly data growth. With an increasingly digitized patient-facing environment, many of their applications simply can’t be down at all. JPS uses VirtualWisdom as a predictive analysis solution to see issues before they become problems. JPS finds VirtualWisdom to be very complementary to the vendor-supplied tools like Brocade’s DCFM and HDS’ Tuning Manager.
Read the full case study »
Read the ESG Report on JPS Health Network’s use of VirtualWisdom »
Read SearchStorage Article on Virtual Instruments/HDS solution for JPS Health Network »
View the JPS Health Network Presentation at SNW Fall 2010 »
Healthcare Services
This large Healthcare Services provider uses Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom SAN Availability Probe to help manage its ever-expanding Storage Area Network (SAN). With thousand of partners / customers the IT team is measured by SLAs, and many applications are customer facing, so fast problem resolution is key. They are using SAN Availability Probe identify potential SAN congestion, and enhancing their ability to root cause analysis when it does occur.
Retail & E-Commerce
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Customer Case Study
Regional Supermarket Chain
This leading US regional supermarket chain deployed VirtualWisdom to monitor its SAN to help ensure 100% data availability. VirtualWisdom was chosen after a comprehensive, two year search for the most cost-effective SAN optimization solution.
Austrian Lotteries
The Austrian Lottery Association and its main production datacenter is based close to the city center of Vienna. A parallel datacenter is set up in a branch facility which is also located in the Austrian capitol. With 500 employees, the lottery organization achieved a total revenue of EUR2,642 million in 2010. Founded in 1983, the offerings for its customers have been continuously extended over the years. Virtual Instruments Keeps Austrian Lotteries Up and Running 24x7.
Leading Global Ecommerce Business
The company, with revenues growing 33% year over year, is one of the leading e-commerce businesses allowing payments and money transfers to be made securely through the internet. The challenge facing the IT administrators is really one of transaction visibility through the I/O system, getting meaningful data about their infrastructure on a continuous, real-time basis. Without this data and measurement system, application performance is difficult to optimize, and every application demands the most expensive, tier 1 storage.
North America Based Grocery and Supply Chain
This North America-based grocery and supply chain was experiencing escalating costs of IT in this hyper-competitive market. IT was under pressure to help contribute to the historical profitability of the company by doing more with existing resources. But while the SAN was growing at over 20% per year, the staff was spending an inordinate amount of IT staff time spent on trying to diagnose SAN problems.
Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom was brought in to monitor and troubleshoot the SAN at the main data center, and professional services was engaged to get the staff up to speed on how to measure and diagnose IO problems. Today, potential application slow-downs are identified and corrected, often before the application consumer is even aware of a problem. And they no longer have to "rip and replace" suspected bad components, because VirtualWisdom accurately identifies the real faults, saving both CAPEX and OPEX.
Grocery Retailer Supervalu, Inc.
By investing in the Virtual Instruments NetWisdom solution, Supervalu was able to garner Tier 1 performance by utilizing Tier 2 storage. Scott Furhman, Senior Systems Engineer at Supervalu, presents "SAN Performance Management in Large and Complex Data Centers". In this SNW presentation, Scott:
- Presents an overview of traditional SAN management solutions
- Contrasts them with specific benefits of the NetWisdom solution
- Shares best practices learned from the Supervalu deployment of NetWisdom
- Recaps the business benefits to Supervalu of managing SAN performance
Large Retailer
This leading Retailer was experiencing periodic application performance issues that were affecting both the retail stores and online operations. It was not clear if the performance was originating from the application servers, SAN fabric, storage, or a combination thereof, but it was a chronic problem that was burning up IT staff time and cross IT group goodwill.
Virtual Instruments worked with the storage vendor to analyze and identify areas of inefficiency within the SAN at the main data center. Virtual Instrument’s VirtualWisdom SAN Availability & Optimization solution was set up to monitor the storage virtualization and data from Fibre Channel switches. Analysis of the monitoring data proved that none of the performance problems could be attributed to the SAN. Once the SAN was ruled out as a cause of performance issues, the focus of the investigation could be narrowed significantly.
Services & Utilities
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Customer Case Studies
Mobile Data Services
Leading world-wide supplier of mobile data solutions deploys a VirtualWisdom solution to monitor its SAN to help ensure 100% data availability. Software probe is used to help provide visibility into the Fibre Channel SAN on an ongoing basis to help avoid application slowdowns.
Telecommunications
Telecommunications company deploys VirtualWisdom to monitor its SAN to ensure highest possible data availability. Helps to anticipate the peaks and valleys caused by product launches and avoid or mitigate problems before they cause application slowdowns or outages.
Manufacturing
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Customer Case Studies
Consumer Products
Multinational consumer products giant deploys VirtualWisdom and achieves a 75% reduction of trouble tickets; discovers and solves multi-pathing issues to reduce risk of outages.
StorageExpo Presentation: Unilever
Unilever’s Mike Royle, Enterprise Services IT Director, spoke at Storage Expo in London on Oct 15, 2009 about Unilever’s use of NetWisdom throughout their 5PB data center. The talk is entitled “SAN Optimisation Best Practices: Seeing Through The Clouds Of Virtualisation.” Mike discusses:
- The IT challenges facing Unilever
- The Unilever SAN strategy
- How Unilever is benefitting from the deployment of VirtualWisdom
- Unilever’s use of the Storage Maturity Model
Government
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Customer Case Studies
Large U.S. Federal Agency
This government agency is expected to bring new applications online faster with more certain accountability through a service-based computing model, and needed new monitoring solutions to ensure comprehensive, accurate SLAs. And more tactically, when a performance problem arises, this agency can start investigation at either the server or storage tier, but it’s often not clear which approach is optimal. It needed a rapid drill-down solution to help point to the first places to look for problem root cause.
U.S. Federal Agency
U.S. civilian agency increases staff productivity by speeding root cause analysis, discovers a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in the form of the Exchange Completion Time (ECT) metric. Uses VirtualWisdom to help avoid unnecessary capital expenditures by proving that performance problems could be solved by proper configuration and application tuning, rather than throwing hardware at the problem.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDIES
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