Orange Business Services (OBS) is a global integrator of communications products and services, including cloud and infrastructure as a service. With headquarters in Paris, France, OBS operates in multiple countries worldwide – including Belgium – and employs more than 30,000 people, with 70 percent of its customer base made up of Fortune 500 financial services companies. OBS continuously reviews and improves its IT processes to maintain high levels of IT services to its customers. It was looking for a solution to solve storage issues. Enter VMware.
Analysis challenges for IaaS
To improve its cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, OBS needed to enhance its reporting and analysis tools, and reduce the time taken to locate storage issues. The company’s IT includes NetApp storage running on VMware virtualization. At the time, OBS manually pulled and constructed data from its NetApp environment. In other words: that was time-consuming and provided limited information for its customers. Moreover, the OBS IT teams struggled to find the root cause of virtual machine (VM) slowdowns.
Breaking down silos between storage and virtualization
As OBS systems run on VMware vRealize Suite, the company contacted VMware for possible solutions. So, VMware recommended the vRealize True Visibility Management Pack for NetApp. The OBS team was impressed with the SANtricity-like data depth it could now access within VMware vRealize Operations. As well as providing a better service for its customers, OBS also eased the strain on the company’s IT team by breaking down silos between the storage and virtualization teams.
Improving network visibility to reduce downtime
With the vRealize True Visibility Management Pack for NetApp, OBS is tackling one big issue. Above all this is reducing the time it takes to discover issues that cause downtime. Richard Esteve, a technical leader at Orange Business Services, believe the vRealize True Visibility Management Pack for NetApp plays a major role in helping OBS eliminate downtime. “Thanks to the visibility provided by the vRealize True Visibility Management Pack for NetApp, we can now discover the symptoms of downtime between 70 to 80 percent faster. Minimizing downtime is crucial to the success of both OBS and our customers, so reducing it is one of our key objectives. To see such a reduction in discovery time is brilliant,” he says.
Customer satisfaction is also on the rise thanks to the increased details included in automated reports. Esteve said: “To effectively manage their IT environments, our customers require an understanding of what is happening across the environment. VMware’s out-of-the-box dashboards provide exactly that, which is greatly improving our overall customer experience. The dashboards are easy to digest, and they allow IT teams to act on analytics and trends being generated.”
