Telco Avoids P2V "Collateral Damage" with FactFinder

Application-centric approach to Data Center move with Virtualization Conversion Helps Major Telco Provider Avoid Disrupting Business Applications

Business Challenge

One of the world’s largest Telco providers maintains a large data center in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.  This facility houses several hundred servers supporting numerous applications and is supported by an experienced IT staff. The System Architect and System Administrator needed to understand their environment to determine which servers could be decommissioned, which were ideal for converting and, most importantly, which supported applications critical to the operation of the company.

The goal was to move images, not hardware, with minimal interruption to the business. In their words, they wanted to avoid any “P2V Collateral Damage” during their move.

The IT staff at this Telco knew they couldn’t simply start converting servers to VMs. They wanted to protect critical applications running on their systems, so they needed to fully understand the complete application dependency mapping to ensure a safe conversion.

With limited visibility into both their physical and virtual environments, the System Architect and System Administrator had the insight to know they needed to discover all the connections, dependencies and processes running on each server to eliminate any unnecessary disruption.

There were a number of deliverables they were seeking from a solution, including:

• Provide application visibility and dependency understanding for both physical and virtual environments,
• Validate application resources being used, as part of the P2V conversion process, to identify critical components,
• Track application activity (processes, transactions) in order to de-commission servers with no application service interruptions.
• Improve application-level problem identification for triage to improve their mean time to application problem resolution by quickly isolating issues

Technical Challenge

The team was responsible for any and all performance issues with the data center, which included application support, so it was critical for them to be able to isolate problems coming from the network, applications, hardware, and VMs.  They needed to isolate and resolve problems quickly to keep their applications performing well and to meet SLAs. 

Their environment consisted of a number of platforms, including Win2000, Win2003, SQL server, and VMware ESX servers supporting numerous back-office applications. They had multiple tiers including third-party applications, custom applications and multiple databases.

Tools available to the team included existing server management tools, which allowed IT to see how servers and VMs were performing, but provided no visibility into application processes or performance. They required detailed application performance metrics which would enable them to certify the performance before and after the move, as part of their P2V process.

Solution

FactFinder, an Application Service Management solution from BlueStripe, was deployed to identify application dependencies, connections and performance measurement. FactFinder automatically discovered and mapped the entire application infrastructure, highlighting process-level transactions and dependencies end-to-end, while capturing detailed performance metrics to measure the applications health. This level of insight enabled their application administrators to quickly recognize their application’s core components across tiers and identify potential performance issues and quickly triage problems when they occurred.

Benefits

FactFinder automatically identified unknown dependencies that, had they not been identified, would have crippled the application during the move and been difficult to isolate. FactFinder provided insight into the application activity levels to ensure no servers were changed without understanding the complete ecosystem of dependencies, ensuring the applications remained intact.

FactFinder delivered the details of their application infrastructure, allowing them to identify applications and servers not in use, as well as those dependent upon other components. FactFinder also allowed them to benchmark performance and take a snapshot of performance ranges before and after the changes. Details of performance and configuration, including the existing shape of their application infrastructure, provide invaluable insight into the make-up of the application.

By understanding their application ecosystem, they were able to move forward with their P2V projects with confidence, knowing they could avoid any P2V Collateral Damage along the way.