About Gothaer Systems
Gothaer Systems is the IT service provider for the Gothaer insurance group, managing data centres, servers and network infrastructure, as well as desktop workstations for more than 6,000 users. Gothaer Systems employs 700 people, and generates annual revenues of more than €150 million.
Challenge
The Gothaer group wanted to improve customer service and business efficiency by introducing a major new e-business platform. The new system would give customers rapid online access to information.
"To support these online services, we needed to be able to ensure 24x7 availability—not just for the new Web servers, but also for all the core systems that the e-business platform depends on," said Thomas Werner, Team Leader—Systems Management at Gothaer Systems. "Our existing monitoring systems told us when a system was down, but gave no context of the dependencies. This made it difficult to identify and resolve problems quickly."
With nearly 750 servers running Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, WebSphere Application Server and other custom applications on a heterogeneous mixture of Windows, Linux and UNIX operating systems, Gothaer Systems needed to find a highly versatile centralised monitoring solution, capable of handling all these different environments.
Novell Solution
With these requirements in mind, Gothaer Systems started to evaluate monitoring solutions from leading vendors and drew up a shortlist of three: IBM, BMC and Novell.
"Every solution had to face a direct proof of concept in the Gothaer Systems environment," said Werner. "We wanted to find out which product was best able to meet our needs, and how difficult it would be to install, use and maintain. The proof of concept showed that Novell had the most convincing solution, and the deepest understanding of what business service management meant for our business."
Novell Business Service Manager also stood out from the competition due to its out-of-the-box functionalities. The software was easy to install, and provided advanced tools for mapping the whole infrastructure and documenting the dependencies between systems.
"The difference with the Novell solution was that we did not have to struggle with the tools themselves," said Werner. "We realised during the proof of concept that the complex task of mapping our entire infrastructure would be much quicker and easier with Novell Business Service Manager than with any of the other solutions on the market."
Novell helped the Gothaer Systems team design, install and configure Novell Business Service Manager in a project that lasted one year, and took place in parallel with the development of the new e-business platform. The solution, known internally as "Product-oriented Monitoring", was initially used to cover these new systems themselves, before being extended to cover the rest of the infrastructure on a step-by-step basis.
"Novell and the in-house team worked well together, and demonstrated excellent project management skills," said Werner. "By prioritising the rollout on a 'quick win' basis, we have already been able to bring more than 70 percent of our systems into the new monitoring environment—so we were able to launch the new e-business platform on schedule."
Results
With Novell Business Service Manager, Gothaer Systems has gained a single, central system that can monitor its complex, heterogeneous infrastructure in near real time. Whether a problem occurs at the hardware, operating system or application level, the IT team is notified.
"Instead of receiving alerts from several different systems, and then having to read through the documentation to understand whether they are related, Novell Business Service Manager enables us to see immediately where the problems are and which systems are affected," said Werner. "With a full understanding of the dependencies between systems, it is much easier to diagnose and resolve problems—leading ultimately to better availability and improved customer service."
The new e-business platform needs to be available 24x7 to serve customers, so Novell Business Service Manager plays a vital role in the success of the company's online strategy. But Gothaer Systems has also seen the benefit of rolling out the solution for systems that are not part of the online solution.
"Without Novell Business Service Manager, we could not have met the needs of the company's e-business strategy—it simply wouldn't have been possible to monitor our e-business systems from a service perspective," said Werner. "With the solution, we can more effectively and accurately see and diagnose IT infrastructure issues."