2 page Case Study - Posted 3/27/2007

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Sodexho

Sodexho Gains “Keen Insight” into Infrastructure Through Enterprise Monitoring Solution

Sodexho, the leading food and facilities management services company in North America, needed a monitoring solution that would give it a comprehensive view of its dispersed and segmented environment, enable customized real-time reports, help support granular role-based views for greater security and productivity, and provide audit collection service. That’s what it’s getting with Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Business Needs

Managing the technology infrastructure for Sodexho’s massive and geographically dispersed enterprise is a challenge. Sodexho, after all, is the leading food and facilities management services company in North America.

We’ll save tremendous amounts of time and gain a keen insight into our Windows infrastructure thanks to the information we gain from Operations Manager 2007—information we never had the time or ability to gather before. Robert Kuehfus LAN Engineer, Sodexho

The company has monitored its IT infrastructure successfully with Microsoft® Operations Manager 2005 but, as Sodexho has continued to grow, so have its monitoring requirements. The company wanted increasingly customized and real-time reports both to enable proactive management and to inform corporate decision making.

While Sodexho’s IT personnel were specialized—with separate administrators for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server™, the Active Directory® service in the Windows Server® operating system, and network operations, as well as developers of custom solutions—the monitoring alerts system was not.

To see the alerts relevant to their jobs, administrators also had to receive all the alerts that weren’t relevant to them—making it difficult to notice and act on alerts. And with event logs overwritten several times a day, it was difficult to provide audit trails needed both to meet regulatory requirements and to respond to security concerns.

Solution

Sodexho is addressing these needs by migrating to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, the best-of-breed end-to-end service management solution for the Windows® operating system. The company began evaluating a prerelease version of the solution in October 2006 and was so impressed that it began production deployment even before the software’s final release in March 2007.

The company’s production environment consists of a database server, a root management server, and a secondary management server that supports an audit collection service. The environment also includes a reporting server and a gateway server in the DMZ between the internal and external environments.

Adopting System Center Operations Manager 2007 has been “very straightforward,” according to Robert Kuehfus, LAN Engineer at Sodexho’s Buffalo, NY data center. When moving from a prerelease version of the software to a later version, Kuehfus was able to uninstall and reinstall the five-server environment in just five hours. The solution was deployed in a side-by-side migration with Operations Manager 2005; the company is running both versions until it is ready to cut over to the new software.

Sodexho takes advantage of Microsoft Operations Manager management packs, which contain best practice knowledge to discover, monitor, troubleshoot, report on, and resolve problems for specific technologies.

Where Sodexho has not customized those management packs—such as for its Exchange Server and Active Directory environments—it’s simply adopting the new System Center Operations Manager 2007 versions of those management packs and writing new scripts to accommodate differences in operation between the two product versions.

For management packs that it has heavily customized, such as its Citrix management pack, Sodexho is using the System Center Operations Manager 2007 conversion tool to preserve and extend its investment into the new monitoring environment.

Benefits

By migrating to System Center Operations Manager 2007, Sodexho is achieving every item on its monitoring wish-list.

The benefits that will come from the use of a gateway server to integrate its monitoring environments into a single, enterprisewide environment are “a big step in the right direction,” according to Kuehfus. The result will be reduced costs for licensing, easier administration, significant hardware savings, and productivity savings of up to 25 percent of monitoring administrator staff time by eliminating the need to maintain two separate monitoring environments.

The ability to easily create custom reports gives Kuehfus and his colleagues greater ability to explore potential problems and service-level issues. The infrastructure team will use the reporting capability in System Center Operations Manager 2007 to develop the company’s comprehensive understanding of server utilization; it will use that understanding to plan strategic initiatives such as a major server consolidation and virtualization project. Reports will also enable Sodexho to be more proactive in managing its environment, reducing the rate and duration of incidents. 

“We’ll save tremendous amounts of time and gain a keen insight into our Windows infrastructure thanks to the information we gain from Operations Manager 2007—information we never had the time or ability to gather before,” says Kuehfus. 

The role-based views enabled by System Center Operations Manager 2007 will enable Sodexho to create isolated views into the monitoring environment for each of its application- or service-specific administrators. Exchange Server administrators will only see and be able to clear Exchange Server incidents, for example.

“Our IT staff will become incredibly more productive because when they get an alert, they’ll know it’s relevant to them and they won’t overlook it,” says Kuehfus.

The use of audit collection service will enable IT teams to provide detailed information to identify the source of obscure system problems. It will enable the company’s security team much more granular information to speed research and troubleshooting. And it will help the company to meet the increasing raft of regulatory requirements.