ONI Reduces Downtime Time and Increases Security

Overview

ONI is a leading provider of IT solutions and services to both the public sector and commercial markets. Privately owned, ONI offers a comprehensive range of on-site, cloud, and hybrid technology solutions. ONI Cloud services are delivered from their own Tier 3+ Data Centre, located in the SE of England, and include infrastructure, Disaster Recovery, Unified Communications, Collaboration and Contact Centre solutions as-a-service.

In short

• Zero issues/VMware incidents across 5 vCenters and 50+ hosts
• 70-80% man-hours time savings
• Over 100 issues detected and fixed

Challenge

The ONI IT team manages 5 vCenters with 50+ hosts which include Management hosts, Disaster Recovery hosts and IaaS hosts. As a service provider, ONI relies on uptime and performance as key indicators of business success and maintaining their public reputation, so it is critical that they stay on top of any issues that could potentially compromise these elements. “As our cloud grew, identifying all these issues and to what they applied became an increasingly more arduous task,” said Mr. Gordon Howes, Cloud Service Manager.

Solution

The IT team spotted Runecast at VMworld Barcelona and appreciated that Runecast was not only a monitoring tool, but also correlated actual KBs from VMware and alerted the ONI IT team to parts of the environment that were susceptible to issues.

ONI ran an evaluation against both the production and development platforms and the Runecast Analyzer was fully deployed and configured within one hour. Despite already meeting high quality standards and being built by VCP qualified experts, Runecast Analyzer found over 100 issues in ONI’s platform such as PSOD, open ports, non-redundant NIC configurations, Network driver issues. The team quickly fixed many of them with a single configuration change described in the “Resolution” section of Knowledge Base the Analyzer found.

Results

Now, ONI uses Runecast to successfully mitigate issues that may cause an outage. The main benefit is the reduction in time it takes to understand what issues they have on their platform and what action they need to take.

The software from Runecast has positively impacted ONI in several areas:

• Reduced VMware-related incidents - By deploying Runecast, ONI has reduced their typical 2 issues per month to 0.
• Issues Discovered - Runecast Analyzer initially discovered more than 100 issues, some of which were deemed critical (PSOD, open ports, Network driver issues).
• 70-80% Time Savings - The team has saved a lot of time with Runecast regularly scanning the environment and reporting against the findings. Runecast significantly helps to reduce time it takes to understand any potential issues and mitigate them before they impact service.
• Increased Security - ONI is a business assured organization. Runecast Analyzer helps them to identify areas which are non-compliant against VMware security hardening rules.
• Team focus - The Analyzer frees up time for the ONI virtualization team and reducing amount of time taken to identify the root causes of issues, allowing the team to work on other important tasks associated with customer support and company growth.

Live & Interactive Runecast Customer Interview - Meet Richard Stone from ONI

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