Suburban Propane Uses Akorri BalancePoint

Akorri, Inc. announced that Suburban Propane Partners, L.P., a nationwide distributor of propane, fuel oil and related products and services, as well as a marketer of natural gas and electricity, is using Akorri’s award-winning BalancePoint software to optimize virtual machine performance and save on hardware costs within its highly-virtualized, centralized data center.

"When we started using VMware and making numerous technology updates in our data center three years ago, we began looking for a product that would help us with two concerns: one – to tell us how many servers we could consolidate onto each of our virtual machines without adversely affecting performance and two – to resolve a performance issue we could not get to the bottom of," said Tom Chorba, Senior Supervisor, Networks at Suburban Propane. "We chose Akorri’s BalancePoint because of its soup-to-nuts view of both virtual and physical server and storage environments, and ability to provide a combination of holistic and deep drill down reporting in an easy to read dashboard view."

"During our initial product evaluation, BalancePoint was able to identify that our performance problem was in our Storage Area Network (SAN) with contention in the disk groups rather than in Windows where we originally thought, which immediately sold us on its value," continued Chorba. "And BalancePoint’s Performance Index showed us we could push our virtual machine hosts harder – we were able to significantly increase the number of servers put on our virtual machines and save costs in hardware purchases."

"We have so much more visibility into infrastructure performance now, and we still want to dig in further to the reporting available to us to look at performance trends to understand further where to invest – there’s a wealth of information and potential with BalancePoint," said Chorba.

Within its centralized data center, Suburban Propane currently has 200 servers running on 15 VM hosts, with virtualized applications such as PeopleSoft, Citrix, SAP and Exchange. Suburban Propane originally purchased one BalancePoint license for half of their SAN environment, and has recently continued their investment buying another license to manage the rest of their SAN.

"We are delighted that we could help Suburban Propane get the best possible performance within their data center and help them save real dollars. This is the difference that Akorri’s BalancePoint often makes for companies at a time when IT is being asked to do more with less and virtualization’s benefits are clouded by its complexity," said Allan Wallack, President and CEO for Akorri. "BalancePoint provides that bird’s eye view of the data center combined with deep analysis that enables IT to stop spending time and money on putting out fires with guesswork and start proactively managing their infrastructure service."