Fortisphere, a Virtual Service Management software company, today announced the completion of a successful implementation for DAI, assisting the international development firm in evolving its virtual management approach to more confidently support quickly increasing business critical workloads.
With nearly 2000 staff worldwide, DAI confronts development challenges in a wide range of practices and in countries. Even shortly after taking occupancy in a new Washington, DC-area facility several years ago, DAI’s rapid growth soon meant the data center was running out of space.
In an effort to alleviate constraints around space, power and climate control, DAI leveraged VMware ESX. The technical success and initial savings encouraged DAI’s IT team to extend virtualization further across the infrastructure. Soon, over 50% of DAI’s servers had been virtualized. But as resources reached their limits, and with no reliable view into precisely how virtual resources supported their respective services, whenever application performance issues reared their head, virtual servers became the de facto scapegoat.
DAI’s IT team had used VMware’s Virtual Center with some initial success to maintain individual virtual machines (VMs) at a very granular level. But because the team didn’t have the visibility required to associate each VM with the particular business services each supported, virtual administrators had no way by which to prioritize which issues to tackle first. As the infrastructure grew, this bottom-up, manual process for problem resolution increasingly led to shortfalls in service delivery.
In early 2009, DAI turned to Fortisphere Virtual Service Manager (VSM) to transform its approach to virtualization management, with the mantra in mind that all VMs are not created equal. Firstly, VSM provided a visual inventory of all VMs, with extensive drilldown capabilities. But VSM also went beyond mapping, furnishing administrators the ability to intelligently tag each VM and associate the services it provides with specific business functions or projects. Once worked with business stakeholders to define mutually agreed service levels, VSM in turn furnished role-based views that display filtered data on only those VMs relevant to each stakeholder.
As a result of the implementation, DAI solves issues leveraging a new level of visibility, control and automation across its entire virtual environment. Fortisphere VSM has enabled the IT organization to reduce administrative costs, by optimizing virtual administrators’ productivity through an approach that prioritizes issue resolution based on service impact. This means its business users receive better service, and overall IT has earned much greater stakeholder confidence.
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