NCC Media harnesses the enormous reach and consumer power of cable television programming, new interactive technologies, and online products in every US market.
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NCC Reduces Outages and Issues by 75%

Overview

NCC Media is an advertising sales, marketing, and technology company that harnesses the enormous reach and consumer power of cable television programming, new interactive technologies, and online products in every US market. NCC is headquartered in the Chrysler Building in New York City with over 600 employees across 17 offices nationwide.

In short

  • 75% fewer issues (20 issues/month before, now less than 5)
  • 50% man-hours time savings
  • 1 hour installation

Challenge

NCC media regularly migrates critical core infrastructure to VMware vSphere v6 and it is very important that the user experience stays consistent. “We have had several situations where we experienced an outage,” says Henderson Alleyne, Director of Network Operations at NCC Media. “We later found out that there were a few ongoing issues in the environment that eventually brought our systems down. The troubleshooting took too long because we had to call VMware Support Center in many cases. We were thinking of having a tool that would give us insight to potential issues that could take systems offline.

Solution

The IT team installed Runecast Analyzer in less than an hour in their lab environment for PoC validation. It quickly turned out to be the proactive solution to address their issues with random outages.

By running Runecast Analyzer in the production environment, it detected more than 50 issues impacting their VMware system downtime or performance. Additionally, the Analyzer identified problems with Port Groups not having NIC redundancy, mixed versions of ESXi hosts, and BPDU filtering disabled. Under the previous setup, these issues were hard to find because it would require dozens of hours spent auditing each detailed configurations.

Results

The team now uses Runecast Analyzer on daily basis to scan their infrastructure before and after any changes to identify any potential issues that could arise after updates and upgrades.

The software from Runecast has positively impacted NCC Media in several areas.

  • Issues Discovered - Runecast Analyzer discovered dozens of critical issues which lead to fewer outage incidents. The amount of virtualization incidents significantly dropped by 75% from 20 per month to less than 5.
  • Time Savings - Having immediate access to solutions of detected issues has been a great time saver through preventative diagnosis and with a reduced number of man hours devoted to server outages by 50%
  • Cost Savings - The NCC network operation team no longer needs to pay for costly external consultants who provide fewer insights than running Runecast Analyzer.
  • Consistent User Experience - Fewer outages result in fewer interruptions for users, leading to greater satisfaction and reliability
Highlights
  • 75% fewer issues (20 issues/month before, now less than 5)
  • 50% man-hours time savings
  • 1 hour installation
  • First scan discovered more than
  • 50 issues Proactively identifies hard-to-find issues

“We found out that there were a few ongoing issues in the environment that eventually brought our systems down. The troubleshooting took too long because we had to call VMware Support Center in many cases. We were thinking of having a tool that would give us insight to potential issues that could take systems offline.”

Henderson Alleyne
Director of Network Operations
NCC Media

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