SandRidge Energy uses BalancePoint to decipher
virtual machines, storage and operating systems
to increase IT efficiency and productivity

SandRidge Energy, Inc. is a natural gas and oil company headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with its principal focus on exploration and production in West Texas, the Permian Basin, the Cotton Valley Trend in East Texas, the Gulf Coast, and the Gulf of Mexico.  SandRidge and its subsidiaries also own and operate gas gathering and processing facilities  and CO2 treatment and transportation facilities. Lariat Services, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of SandRidge, owns and operates a drilling rig and related oil field services business.  Additionally, SandRidge conducts marketing and tertiary oil recovery operations.

 “BalancePoint increases our efficiency by correlating and historically tracking the data automatically.”

Cameron Han
Manager, Senior Systems Engineer

Challenge: Infrastructure-Wide Management

Over the past two years SandRidge virtualized 60% of its IT environment, including test and production applications. Today, over 140 virtual machines are running on nine physical hosts supported by NetApp storage. The complex environment required a management solution  that could reveal how all of their resources were being utilized, and optimize the entire IT environment’s virtual and physical server and storage components. From a feature, function, and price standpoint, Akorri’s BalancePoint seemed the ideal choice to solve SandRidge’s mounting performance issues. After the initial evaluation period, SandRidge’s IT staff agreed.

Solution: Akorri BalancePoint intelligently prevents and resolves
performance problems

BalancePoint’s ability to automatically correlate data and analyze interdependencies between resources in heterogeneous, distributed environments, allows SandRidge to monitor the entire environment as a system. BalancePoint provided the confidence for SandRidge to continue virtualizing more of its data center environment.

"Before BalancePoint, we had to consult four different tools to resolve issues, which often took a few systems engineers and up to a day to comb through the data and find the ‘needle in the haystack’."

According to Cameron Han, Senior Systems Engineer, “In the past, when there was a performance
problem, we had to consult four different tools to resolve issues, which often takes a few systems engineers and up to a day to comb through the data and find the ‘needle in the haystack’. We look forward to having Akorri’s BalancePoint increase our efficiency by doing this work for us, correlating and historically tracking data.”

Results

  • Increased IT efficiency and productivity
  • Reduced troubleshooting time
  • Able to proactively optimize data center infrastructure performance