4-page Case Study - Posted 9/21/2007
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Bank Plans to Cut Maintenance Workload in Half with System Center Operations Manager
Handelsbanken is one of four major banks in Sweden, with branches worldwide. The Swedish branches had been using IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM). When it was time to upgrade from ITM 5.1, the company switched to Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 to simplify maintenance and take advantage of its proactive alerts on system status , which the company expects will extend the life of its existing hardware. Handelsbanken plans to cut its IT monitoring team from four people down to two, which will free up two developers to work on Handelsbanken’s internally developed applications.
Situation
Handelsbanken has 460 branch offices in Sweden and 175 others worldwide. The branch offices in Sweden, known internationally as Svenska Handelsbanken, had been using IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC) software since 1997 to monitor about 1,600 infrastructure, file and print, and application servers based on both the Windows Server® 2003 operating system and UNIX. Handelsbanken’s heterogeneous environment included Fujitsu Siemens and HP servers, some of which ran WebSphere, Citrix, and AS/400 software.
The company wanted to consolidate its Windows Server–based servers in Sweden to 1,200 and improve operations of those servers. In late 2005, the license for Tivoli was running out, and the company began evaluating new monitoring solutions. Mats Dahlbäck, IT Project Manager, Handelsbanken, says, “We shopped for a new solution mainly to reduce the workload on the IT people managing ITM 5.1 because it was very labor intensive to maintain. Also, it did not always detect problems; someone would notice that a system was down, and Tivoli hadn’t alerted us.”
Roger Morell, Project Architect, Handelsbanken, adds, “Our technical people had issues with getting information from ITM 5.1 because it wasn’t very visual. For instance, it didn’t have a database where it collected information and allowed us to do graphical CPU usage analysis. It more or less just reacted and sent alerts.”
Solution
Handelsbanken sent out a request for proposal to several vendors. The company invited Microsoft, IBM, and HP to each run a small-scale, six-day proof of concept in its test laboratory, which had a dedicated server on which each vendor could install its product and 10 servers for the candidate products to monitor. The potential monitoring products were Microsoft® Operations Manager 2005, ITM 6.1, and HP’s OpenView.
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With Tivoli, we had to do basically everything ourselves. We had to tell it what to monitor.… With Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft supplies that information. |
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Roger Morell
Project Architect, Handelsbanken |
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“We invited our technical people to help evaluate,” says Morell. “They were responsible for our Microsoft SQL Server components, our Windows Server components, Active Directory, WebSphere, and Lotus Notes.”
The company decided to go with Microsoft because of ease of use, the connectivity to other tools offered through the management packs, and the visual representation of system performance. Morell says, “Our technical people liked the visualization of the environment. With Operations Manager 2005, they could go back a month and look at how the server CPU was behaving. They could get statistics, and they liked that very much.”
Because the next release of Operations Manager—Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007—was near, Handelsbanken chose it over Operations Manager 2005. The company joined the Rapid Deployment Program at Microsoft Sweden so that it could evaluate and deploy a beta version prior to the software’s official release.
Dahlbäck says, “When we decided to go with Microsoft, we did a proper proof of concept and ran it for several months—we really tested the management packs, such as the ones for Citrix and HP servers.” Management packs extend System Center Operations Manager 2007 management capabilities to Microsoft and third-party operating systems, applications, and other technology components. Most Microsoft product management packs are included with Operations Manager, and many software and hardware manufacturers create and offer management packs for their own products. Companies like Handelsbanken can even create their own management packs for proprietary software.
Handelsbanken used the Microsoft management packs for Windows Server, the Active Directory® service, Microsoft SQL Server™ database software, Microsoft Systems Management Server, and Internet Information Services.
Benefits
Of the three potential monitoring products, Morell says, “Operations Manager won hands down. It had the most professional interpretation. The other vendors’ products didn’t run as smoothly and weren’t as secure.” Handelsbanken has installed System Center Operations Manager 2007 on more than 500 servers and plans to transfer all its monitoring of both Web applications and Windows Server 2003–based servers (including servers running WebSphere) from ITM and TEC. It also anticipates cutting its IT monitoring workload by 50 percent.
Ease of Use
Handelsbanken uses System Center Operations Manager out of the box to automate routine monitoring tasks. “One of my main reasons for really liking Operations Manager 2007 was that it’s so self-configured. It detects monitoring configurations on servers and installs the appropriate monitoring agents on them automatically. With Tivoli, we had to do basically everything ourselves,” says Morell. “We had to tell it what to monitor in Windows Server, SQL Server, and so on. With Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft supplies that information in the included management packs—that’s a huge amount of knowledge packaged with the product.”
Proactive Monitoring, Decreased Downtime
Handelsbanken can better identify and manage the health of its IT systems thanks in part to the HP-created server management pack. “The HP management pack for hardware has already proven itself,” says Morell. “Many of our HP servers have redundant power supplies, and now when one of them fails, we get an alert. We would never have noticed that with Tivoli—those power supplies would have been broken for years, until the second ones failed too and the servers stopped working. Now we can replace them when the first one goes, with no interruption of service.” When Fujitsu Siemens releases its server management pack, Handelsbanken plans to use it too.
This functionality helps the company extend the life of existing hardware and improve system performance because IT staff are alerted to problems before they cause downtime or failures.
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| Diagram of the solution architecture at Handelsbanken |
Customizable, End-to-End Service Management
The company gets end-to-end service management of Microsoft and third-party products that is easy to customize and extend with management packs. Morell says, “Management packs are half the reason to choose Operations Manager. The Microsoft product teams themselves create the packs for Microsoft products—and that’s the way it should be.”
Though it could write its own management packs for third-party products, Handelsbanken found that System Center Operations Manager 2007 is already supported by many manufacturers. Morell says, “To see that HP, which offers its own monitoring product—which we also tested—so promptly released a management pack for its servers shows how important the market sees a monitoring product from Microsoft. It’s very comforting to us. With Tivoli, we had no choice but to write our own, and it took a lot of time and was quite difficult because we have a vast variety of HP servers and hardware. Now, we can just install the management pack from HP to monitor everything. That is very powerful.”
IT Monitoring Workload to Be Reduced and IT Productivity Increased
With the time freed from maintaining ITM, Dahlbäck says, “We’re going to improve the monitoring of our own developed applications. That’s a huge bonus for us. With Operations Manager 2007, we were able to not only duplicate what ITM did, but to also get performance data written directly into our data warehouse from the management servers.” This functionality improves data warehouse scalability, as the raw data points can be compressed in the data warehouse.
Dahlbäck continues, “We plan to reduce the maintenance monitoring team from four IT people down to two. This means that we will be able to provide a lot of extra resources, approximately two persons’ worth, to our internal developers.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Handelsbanken products and services, call (46) (8) 701 10 00 or visit the Web site at:
www.handelsbanken.se
