Southern Company, one of the US`s largest providers of electricity, has deployed NetIQ AppManager to help it manage its growing base of Windows NT-based servers. As a major producer of electricity in the US, Southern supplies power to some 11 million customers over a 120 000-square-mile service area that spans most of the Southeast. Through international subsidiaries and affiliates, Southern also provides electricity in South America, Europe, and Asia.
To support the company`s mission-critical operations (including its five electric utilities in the Southeast), 25 000 US employees, and millions of customers, Southern depends on an information infrastructure that includes more than 650 systems running the Microsoft BackOffice family of server applications.
As Southern continues to grow, its Information Resources (IR) Group is undertaking a phased migration of its existing information systems to Windows NT with Internet Information Server. By the end of the project, the total number of servers running BackOffice products is expected to grow from the 600 currently deployed to well beyond 800. To manage the performance, availability, and reliability of its distributed Windows NT-based systems, Southern selected Microsoft Certified Solution Provider NetIQ`s AppManager Suite, a robust management solution for large-scale deployments of Windows NT.
Managing a growing Windows NT-based environment "We have a very distributed environment here at Southern Company," says technical specialist Randy Beggs. "As the number of NT-based systems increases, we need to ensure we have systems management well under control."
With an eye to reducing the total cost of ownership of a growing number of systems, Southern selected AppManager for a few key reasons. "First and foremost, we wanted to reduce the potential threat of server downtime through early warning and detection," says Beggs. "AppManager does this, and it does this well." The group also wanted to have a tool that could provide trending and forecasting to assist in decisions regarding future hardware and software acquisitions.
As Southern rolled out NT, it became apparent that a robust, centralised monitoring tool was required. Factors that necessitated this included a need for proactive knowledge of disk space usage and overall system availability, as well as the fact that systems were deployed to remote locations where there was varying expertise in managing NT. "Before we brought AppManager in, much of this functionality was not available in a standardised, consistent, and accurate manner," says Beggs.
The IR Group evaluated a number of products including system management frameworks and other management utilities before selecting AppManager. "As one might expect with such an extensive search for the right solution, we encountered a wide range of product functionality and problems with many of the tools we brought in."
It was important to the Southern team that it select a best-of-breed solution for its NT-based deployment that could provide the deepest level of monitoring, easy deployment, and a methodology to integrate with other management frameworks that were already in existence at Southern. "A lot of the other solutions we encountered only scratched the surface," Beggs says. "Others were cumbersome or did not perform as advertised. AppManager`s monitoring capabilities took management to another level."
Given the large number of systems and the variety of NT-based applications Southern had already deployed, the IR team had a number of key criteria that played an important role in the selection process. "We needed a scalable solution that allowed for a high degree of customisation, remote installation across our environment, and easy centralised installation," says Beggs.
With so many vendors moving into the NT-based management space, it was also critical to select a product that was stable under Windows NT and would not create server abends. "Above all the tools we looked at, NetIQ came through with a solution that did everything they said it could and more," Beggs says. "And it supported various platforms, which many vendors at the time did not support."
Customisable and effective
AppManager is now deployed to more than 469 servers and monitors the status of the company`s IR infrastructure through remote monitoring, automated recovery and reporting. Based on Microsoft standard technologies such as Visual Basic for Applications, SQL Server and the Component Object Model (COM), AppManager was easily tailored to manage other third-party applications that Southern already uses in-house.
Southern plans to gradually deploy AppManager agents to all its NT-based servers in its core business. The deployment will be managed out of the Atlanta headquarters` IR Infrastructure Management Group and will eventually include more than 800 machines deployed across a four-state area.
To the surprise of the IR team, the installation of AppManager has been effective in detecting weaknesses within the infrastructure. "The product is helping us to address infrastructure weakness and improve our foundation," Beggs says.
"In short, NetIQ has brought to our attention and helped us as an organisation to take corrective action regarding infrastructure improvements to plan our infrastructure for the future."
When millions of people depend on a business to provide something as critical as the power they use every minute of every day, the right decisions about information infrastructure have to be made from day one. "With NetIQ, it`s been win/win from the start," says Beggs.
NetIQ products are distributed in South Africa by Server Tools.
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