To achieve continued growth, Belgium-based Belgacom Group, a provider of integrated communications and media services, needed to ensure improved service availability for both its employees and customers. Like many other communications services providers worldwide, it faces the challenge of integrating and monitoring heterogeneous operations and business support system networks.

For several years, the company relied on a number of disparate monitoring tools. Executives had decided to consolidate on a single solution to reduce software-licensing costs and increase IT efficiency; however Berat and others found that it did not offer a complete view of the health of applications running Windows, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, which had become increasingly important for Belgacom.

“The ability to detect bottlenecks and other potential problems with SQL Server is vital to the performance of a growing number of distributed applications,” says Serge Berat, Solution Engineer for the Windows Engineering Team at Belgacom.

After evaluating several options, Belgacom found a solution to centralize monitoring of its virtual machines through the deployment of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware, based on both Windows Server Hyper-V technology and VMware vSphere. It also runs critical line-of-business applications on its virtual servers to stay competitive and support the delivery of innovative consumer product bundles and services.

“We’ve made a substantial investment in virtualization technologies to support a variety of functions. If these machines are down, there is a direct, tangible cost in terms of productivity and—potentially—in lost revenue opportunities for the company. It’s imperative that we can keep them running in excellent condition at all times, which means being able to troubleshoot and resolve problems quickly,” says Berat.

Now, Belgacom gains from enhanced visibility into the health of its systems and applications that run on the Windows operating system, and has improved proactive monitoring of its cross-platform virtualized environment. The company’s IT team is also better equipped to meet requests to monitor emerging business applications through the virtualization of approximately 62 per cent of its Windows-based server population. Belgacom is targeting 75 per cent virtualization of this environment by the end of 2011.

Benefits

• Enhanced service monitoring of business-critical infrastructure
• Greater flexibility in meeting monitoring requests
• Simplified management of virtual assets

You can read the original case study here.

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