Raymond James Deploys Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments, in virtual infrastructure optimization, announced Raymond James, a diversified financial services holding company, is using NetWisdom in the company’s St. Petersburg, Florida data center.

According to Raymond James, NetWisdom has enabled the company to continue quickly responding to potential performance and availability problems, and isolate them in a timely manner, well before any impact on the application users. The company has also been able to improve overall asset utilization by controlling the explosion of server sprawl and using NetWisdom to verify that network consolidation does not impact performance.

Like many IT departments, Raymond James is challenged with tight budgets and with getting more performance out of existing hardware assets and personnel. The storage area network (SAN) team’s success is measured by a simple metric: data availability. So taking a purely reactive approach to SAN troubleshooting and performance optimization was out of the question. Getting the job done by massive over-provisioning, so often seen in major data centers, was likewise not an option due to budget constraints.

"We were searching for a solution that would allow us to consolidate our network while not impacting performance," said Doug Ward, storage analyst, Raymond James. "With NetWisdom we have been able to stop server sprawl while still assuring no performance issues impact the application user, allowing us to ensure Raymond James faces little to no impact on our overall bottom line."

In 2008, Raymond James deployed NetWisdom, both the switch monitoring probe (ProbeV) and the Fiber Channel Probe (ProbeFCX) to proactively tackle system availability challenges. After the initial two-day installation service, the storage team spent three weeks establishing a baseline environment, building filters and alerts for metrics that give an early indication of trouble. With NetWisdom, Raymond James was able to monitor loss of sync, link resets, packet discards, aborts, code violations, and CRC errors, while assuring that alarms were sent out for out-of-bounds conditions based on pre-set policies. Additionally, a daily report on the top 10 servers by utilization is sent up the management chain as a quick way to get a meaningful trend of storage usage, helping IT management to devise new baselines and policies to accommodate the changes in the SAN infrastructure.

"We find that most of our customers are facing the challenge of squeezing the maximum performance and utilization out of existing hardware assets, while demands for resources are growing and headcounts are flat," said Mark Urdahl, chief executive officer, Virtual Instruments. "Raymond James is a prime example of how taking a proactive approach to system availability results in significant capital and operational expenditure savings as well as satisfied end users."