Tyco Healthcare

Tyco Gains Global Management View, Cuts Costs 45 Percent, with Monitoring Solution

Tyco Healthcare wanted in-depth information about infrastructure performance to boost effectiveness, reduce costs, and support growth—information it wasn’t getting from its monitoring software. So, the company adopted Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 software. It’s able to institute service-level agreements, redeploy resources more effectively, and save 45 percent over the cost of its previous solution.

 

Business Needs

Tyco Healthcare, a global leader in medical devices, supplies, and pharmaceuticals, has more than U.S.$9.6 billion in annual revenues. It manufactures more than 100,000 products. Its 43,000 employees operate in nearly every country in the world.

We didn’t know what information we weren’t getting from our line of business applications and SQL Server back ends. Now we know what information we should be getting—and we get it. Joseph Davis Project Manager, Tyco Healthcare

Technology investment is crucial to fueling the continued success of this large and fast-growing company—and Tyco Healthcare executives wanted to ensure that they were maximizing the value from that investment, which includes 1,500 servers worldwide. The company deployed third-party monitoring software on most of the infrastructure running the Windows Server® 2003 operating system in its Mansfield, Massachusetts headquarters, including Windows Server Active Directory® domain controllers, file and print servers, line-of-business applications, Documentum document management, and such key Microsoft® servers as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server™ 2005, and Systems Management Server 2003. The goal was to get the information it needed to ensure high availability and cost effectiveness.

But Tyco Healthcare didn’t get what it wanted.

“Our monitoring software wasn’t really giving us information of significance regarding performance analysis,” says Joseph Davis, Project Manager at Tyco Healthcare. “It didn’t catch on with our hubs—in Missouri, England, Australia, and elsewhere—because the only thing we could get out of it was up and down indications of servers. We wanted intelligent information about the utilization of particular databases and services, about root cause analysis, and about best practices—and we weren’t getting it.”

As a result, various regional hubs were choosing their own, inconsistent monitoring solutions—making it more difficult for Tyco Healthcare to develop the single, comprehensive picture of its technology investment necessary for optimal return on investment and continued growth.

Solution

Davis and his colleagues say they’re now on track to develop a deep and highly useful picture of their worldwide infrastructure having implemented Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, the best-of-breed end-to-end service management solution for the Windows® operating system.

The company began testing a prerelease version of the software in October 2006 and initiated its worldwide deployment when the software became publicly available in March 2007. The initial round of that deployment has System Center Operations Manager 2007 monitoring 20 percent of the company’s 1,500 servers, including Active Directory domain controllers, Exchange Server 2003, Systems Management Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, and core Windows Server 2003 servers. Tyco Healthcare plans to expand that coverage to all of its servers by October 2008.

That worldwide coverage is managed from just 15 System Center Operations Manager 2007 servers, including 9 servers in the Mansfield, Massachusetts headquarters—including an active-passive cluster of root management servers, another clustered pair of non-root management servers, and a pair of application servers supporting the Operations Manager Web console and the report builder based on SQL Server Reporting Services. The Operations Manager database is supported on an existing SQL Server farm. Pairs of Operations Manager management servers are based in Tyco Healthcare regional hubs elsewhere in the U.S., England, and Japan. The use of paired clusters provides failover capability, ensuring high reliability of the monitoring environment.

Deployment of the Operations Manager servers and monitoring agents was “really the easy part—a breeze,” says Davis. “We defined the management packs we wanted to use, cloned those configurations to all the servers, and used the Wizard to automate the deployment of the agents.”

Davis and his colleagues are now planning to take advantage of additional functionality in the solution, such as the audit collection service and business scorecard reporting.

Benefits

Tyco Healthcare began to see the benefits of System Center Operations Manager 2007 with its first deployment on the company’s computers running Exchange Server.

“We’re migrating to Operations Manager 2007 throughout our enterprise because of the quantity and quality of information we got out of it when we first installed it on Exchange Server 2003,” says Davis. “It told us more than whether a server was up or down. It told us when backups weren’t completed, when users weren’t in cache mode, when there was a problem with a cluster. It gave us performance metrics we weren’t getting from our previous solution. It opened our eyes to service-level monitoring. We didn’t know what information we weren’t getting from our line of business applications and SQL Server back ends. Now we know what information we should be getting—and we get it.”

More than just providing information, System Center Operations Manager 2007 is giving Tyco Healthcare information it can use to create a more effective and cost-efficient environment. “Now we can put service level agreements in place because we have the information on which to base them,” says Davis. “Its bottom-line impact is that we understand what we have out there and what it’s doing. We’ll be able to shore up weaknesses in our environment and reallocate resources where we have overcapacity—because, for the first time, we’ll understand both the weaknesses and the overcapacity.”

Beyond getting more information than it received from its previous monitoring solution, Tyco Healthcare is getting that information more cost-effectively. Davis estimates the company will save 45 percent of the cost of managing its environment by moving to System Center Operations Manager 2007, in part because it can monitor more remote hubs and sites without requiring additional servers.

And Davis says the solution is scalable enough to support an anticipated doubling of the Tyco Healthcare infrastructure to 3,000 servers over the next seven years—without needing to add a single monitoring server.