At Welch’s — a global brand known for juices, jams, and jellies — IT faced questions regarding hardware, software, and utilization savings. One IT department serving the organization — including manufacturing, supply, and finance — oversees databases, storage, and applications. Welch’s was using AIX/Linux and Oracle tools, but could not fully monitor the environment. Mukesh Sharma, senior manager of IT, database, and ERP infrastructure, oversees all mission-critical infrastructure , and in his words, the approach was “very reactive.” Administrators responded to individual performance complaints using their own approaches.
“Our environment runs very lean, with no dedicated administrators to watch storage or systems. Downtime here slows our entire business, potentially including manufacturing and shipping. We cannot afford any slowdowns, which is why partnering with Galileo made so much sense. They let us see not only what has happened, but also where, when, and why. Better yet, they allow us to prepare for what may happen in the future. That preventive component is vital,” Sharma said.
Enter Galileo’s Performance Explorer, a cloud-based and integrated infrastructure performance management (IPM) suite for servers, storage, SAN, and applications. The solution features dashboard capabilities that offer faster access to valuable insights from a single pane of glass visual console. This includes an Enterprise Dashboard that provides real-time information on all IT assets across an entire enterprise; and a Predictive Analytics Dashboard, which prevents slowdowns and down time while monitoring health across the data center — from operating system problems to storage concerns — with user-defined parameters and enhanced reporting.
With an elastic cloud delivery model for on premise, cloud, or hybrid data center environments, Galileo is particularly valuable for mission critical and secure IT environments.
Performance Information from Every Corner
Welch’s has three to five Galileo users, with “power users” examining infrastructure for bottlenecks. When needed, they can pinpoint the moment of trouble.
“CPU and paging performance have proven to be important features — along with allocation and utilization. We can look back at CPU usage, paging, disk service time, and storage performance. We can quickly transfer ownership of infrastructure performance to the correct people,” said Sharma.
Lower Costs and Greater Efficiency
Welch’s reduced such costs as capacity planning, which once took external analysts weeks. key performance indicators let staff ask better questions on bottlenecks, share information in a common format, and see true data across the organization. They have right-sized hardware, storage, and CPU allocation to needs and streamlined licensing. Optimization reduced costs with less-expensive, more-efficient hardware.
As Welch’s incorporates cloud resources, it anticipates a potential 20% workload reduction over ten years.
“Seeing what happens before and after changes allows us to better utilize resources and maximize efficiency. We can provide detailed justification for business IT spending. Galileo helped us to move toward cost-effective processes and has quickly paid for itself. In the end, we make better decisions, spend less, and feel good about it. Galileo saves dollars while delivering value. I think the IT Intelligence Dashboards will improve how we make decisions across our IT enterprise. Using Galileo, we have already dramatically reduced our decision-making times, and these dashboards act like a crystal ball across our IT environment,” said Sharma.
This article was originally posted “Global manufacturer takes to the cloud to improve performance” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
