“Epsilon has selected Akorri BalancePoint to help us proactively manage storage within our highly virtualized environment.”
End-to-End Infrastructure Management Maximizes Operational Efficiency
Epsilon, an Alliance Data company, is the industry’s leading marketing services firm and the world's largest permission-based email marketer. Ad Age ranks Epsilon #1 U.S. Direct Marketing Agency. Services include strategic consulting, database and loyalty technology, proprietary data, predictive modeling and a full range of creative and interactive services including brand and promotional development, web design, email deployment, search engine optimization and direct mail production.
With an extremely advanced virtualization environment of more than 1400 virtual servers, some possessing as high as a 40-to-1 VM density ratio, the data center had become very complex. Epsilon realized that tools and insight to effectively manage performance of their physical and virtual infrastructure were required. The company had been using the element management tools of the existing infrastructure resources, but knew they wanted a holistic view of the interdependencies between servers and storage. “VMware’s management suite shows you where the server issues are and can tell you that you have an I/O problem, but BalancePoint pinpoints and presents this information in a usable performance map,” said Doug Tschudy.
“BalancePoint showed us that more disk spindles were required to maintain performance. We could have easily bought more than we needed, but with BalancePoint we were able to purchase the right amount,” continued Tschudy. “It would have taken several days and a large number of resources to figure this out on our own. It was the difference between traveling to St. Louis from Colorado on a ten speed or just flying. We had looked at other technologies to solve our storage management problems, but non were end-to-end and most were too cumbersome. We were skeptical when we heard about Akorri’s solution, but it quickly provided its ROI.”
The ROI came for Epsilon when BalancePoint solved performance issues that were impacting company production and delivery of products/services in a timely fashion. Epsilon was also able to save money through right-sizing of hardware purchases which resulted in huge savings on power and administration.
Tschudy stated: “BalancePoint has given us deeper insight into infrastructure-wide performance, from the virtualized server all the way back down to the disk. BalancePoint identifies and resolves performance problems, saving us time and allowing us to devote our resources elsewhere.”
Epsilon leverages BalancePoint when there is a requirement to provision additional storage for its four different VMware infrastructures. If they have a question about whether a particular array on a SAN has the capacity to handle a new load, BalancePoint can find the answer.
Results
- Solved performance problems
- Enhanced provisioning, capacity planning and utilization
- Improved infrastructure purchasing decisions
- Reduced hardware, power and administration costs
- Maximized operational efficiency
Environment
- Servers: More than 1400 virtual servers, with some with a 40-to-1 fan out ratio. Four VMware infrastructures.
- Operating Systems: Windows, XP, Solaaris and Linux
- Storage: 2 Petabytes of storage. Consisting of fiber attached Hitach 2500s and USPs.
- Database: Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and Alterian
- Applications: Exchange, IIS, domain controllers, file and print and production applications.
