2 page Case Study - Posted 9/18/2007

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Gates Corporation

Automotive Parts Manufacturer Boosts Efficiency with Enhanced Monitoring, Reporting

To help its enterprise run more efficiently, Gates Corporation, a leading manufacturer of automotive and industrial belts and hoses, needed a monitoring system that could provide comprehensive reporting data on its 400 business-critical servers. By migrating to Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007, Gates is benefiting from object-level server monitoring and accurate, reliable in-depth reporting. Consequently, Gates estimates that it will improve manufacturing productivity by 10 percent, boosting annual revenue by more than U.S.$10 million. 

Business Needs

Gates Corporation, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of automotive and industrial belts and hoses. Gates is one of the largest privately held companies in the U.S., posting sales of more than U.S.$1.4 billion annually. The company employs more than 5,500 people worldwide.

To keep its manufacturing, marketing, and financial operations running smoothly, Gates uses a highly distributed IT environment that runs Microsoft® Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database software, and the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. Approximately 600 HP servers are set up across five continents—North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Of its 600 servers, approximately 400 are deemed business critical.

In 2005, Gates decommissioned Novell GroupWise, replacing it with Exchange Server.  Paul Johnson, Windows Monitoring Architect & Systems Engineer at Gates, says, “We switched to Microsoft Exchange Server, because our primary manufacturing application is on a Windows®-based environment. Moving to Microsoft eliminated software incompatibility issues and boosted efficiency.” During 2005, the corporation also implemented Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 for system monitoring.

Johnson says that Operations Manager 2005 did an excellent job of monitoring servers and providing reports, but over time the software’s reporting functionality became less reliable as the company continued to grow. “As our data warehouse grew, Operations Manager 2005 couldn’t keep up with it,” he says. “The software wasn’t able to retrieve information accurately from the large database. So we couldn’t get accurate reports from our data warehouse anymore.”

He says that Operations Manager 2005 still provided notifications for server problems, but it took a great deal of analysis to determine why and where a problem occurred. Johnson says, “We needed accurate and reliable reporting servers, so we could know what to fix when the servers went down.”

Solution

In order to enhance the monitoring and reporting functionality on its business-critical servers, Gates decided to migrate to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.

With the new settings available in Operations Manager 2007, I can provide our system administrators with more in-depth monitoring and more explicit alerting. Paul Johnson Windows Monitoring Architect & Systems Engineer, Gates Corporation

Johnson installed the Beta 3 version of System Center Operations Manager 2007 on 10 various servers that ran different programs, including the Active Directory® service in Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Internet Information Services. 

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 environment at Gates consists of four servers, each running the Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition. On two of the servers, Gates runs Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (64-bit), and one of these servers houses the data warehouse and reporting services.

When fully implemented, Johnson says that Gates will be able to monitor its 400 business-critical servers across five continents from a single dashboard, all the way down to a single object, and that kind of monitoring simply wasn’t possible with Operations Manager 2005.

Johnson distinguishes between the two monitoring systems in this way: “Operations Manager 2005 was server-centric—it gave us alerts and notifications, but mostly on the server level. However, Operations Manager 2007 is object-centric. I can configure the new software to monitor and provide reports for dozens of objects—in the server hardware, in the application, and in individual components. IT personnel can see how a particular server is doing, whether proactively or reactively, and drill down to the specific object to learn why.”

Benefits

By far, the primary benefit to Gates is the breadth of reporting that System Center Operations Manager 2007 allows, Johnson notes. “Operations Manager 2007 is enabling us to obtain a real-time availability matrix for the manufacturing environment. We now have a process that shows the availability of the servers that support our manufacturing operations.”
 
In-depth Monitoring and Alerts
Johnson says, “With the new settings available in Operations Manager 2007, I can provide our system administrators with more in-depth monitoring and more explicit alerting.

“We can configure server reports to show downtime warnings, downtime events, and the start time and end time of every occurrence. We can also quickly learn why a server experienced downtime—whether it was a power outage, a hardware or software malfunction, or a server maintenance issue. This kind of reporting experience just was not available in Operations Manager 2005.”

Advanced Monitoring Capabilities Leads to Increased Production and Revenue
The advanced monitoring and accurate, in-depth reporting provided by System Center Operations Manager 2007 is making a very positive impact on Gates uptime and manufacturing efficiency. Johnson estimates that Gates will increase its manufacturing production by about 10 percent in the first year that the new monitoring software is operating. These manufacturing gains will help Gates generate more than $10 million in additional revenue.