Developing custom-tailored software and IT solutions has been pivotal to the business of full-service provider regiocom SE since its inception in 1996. The company’s activities focus on telecommunications, transportation and – in particular – the energy sector, a heavily regulated industry where compliance with strict service level agreements (SLAs) is taken for granted. Dennis Wyrwa, Manager IT Service Operations at the Magdeburg-based company, highlights the supreme importance of SLAs in the context of regiocom’s extensively virtualized IT environment: “Our core infrastructures – featuring DNS and DHCP servers, Active Directories, Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases and SAP as the billing system – are absolutely mission-critical. If you get a bit of a wobble somewhere, everyone will notice it immediately.”
To make sure that never happens, regiocom – a long-standing VMware customer – launched a project in 2018 to monitor and optimize its internal IT operations management based on VMware vRealize Operations and Blue Medora software. Dennis Wyrwa and his 40-strong team believe this combination will give a further boost to SLA compliance. But they also expect it to help them master another major challenge: integrating the call center provider snt Deutschland AG, acquired two years ago, into their own IT infrastructure. Dennis Wyrwa stresses the need to look closely at what could continue to be used and what that would cost.
Boost in efficiency and resource planning
Having implemented version 7.5 of vRealize Operations, the German provider is now able to improve efficiency at both its existing data center and the newly acquired one at a time where everything gets more expensive, while also stabilizing costs. vRealize Operations is a management platform for applications and IT infrastructures alike. Specifically, it enables the performance of individual components to be optimized continuously. But it also makes capacity and cost management more efficient, planning more proactive, and troubleshooting smarter – all while guaranteeing no-gaps compliance. “VMware vRealize Operations shows us exactly where resources are being consumed, what components are running efficiently and how resource allocation can be optimized,” Dennis Wyrwa notes. “That will help keep us competitive for years to come.”
Deep insight into software and hardware
At the same time, Blue Medora lets the company monitor the entire data center environment from the hypervisor, right down to the smallest details of the software and hardware that make up the IT infrastructure. That includes monitoring switches, the HP and Dell blade chassis topologies and pure storage environments. Dennis Wyrwa says regiocom is now able to spot whether a given switch is causing trouble or a particular storage unit will be full, for example. “For Blue Medora, scoping out the depth of the virtual desktop infrastructure environment is no problem either,” Dennis Wyrwa adds. Now that vRealize Operations has Blue Medora by its side, typical IT problems such as CPU overloads due to poorly programmed applications are a thing of the past. “Our SLA guarantees uptime of 99.9 percent, which means a website can be down for no more than 8,5 hours a year including maintenance window,” the IT expert explains. “Thanks to VMware vRealize Operations and Blue Medora, that is no longer a problem.” In the future, regiocom is planning to automate its processes. One aspect will be considering a VDI environment based on VMware Horizon; another will feature container-based development. “We’re only really getting started right now,” Dennis Wyrwa says. “There is still a lot of work to do!”
See the full success story here.
