Project Description
True heterogeneous visibility across the data center environment to support a large scale data center move
Customer: the world’s sixth-largest pharmaceutical company
Industry: pharmaceutical
Size: 10,001+ employees
Task: discover up to 15,000 servers globally and map 100 applications
Duration of the project: 6 months
Why was HP Universal Discovery software chosen?
The client wanted to see host-to-host dependencies between servers across a variety of operating systems and models. HP Universal Discovery delivers on this requirement leveraging methods of access and credentials common to processes in most IT organizations.
Project Overview
Recently, ConfigureTek worked with the IT Software Support team of a large pharmaceutical company. ConfigureTek was tasked with the challenge of creating true heterogeneous visibility across the data center environment to support a large scale data center move. The customer was initially using SCCM to maintain an inventory of servers but lacked the visibility of server dependencies across different operating system flavors. The ConfigureTek team supported this requirement with industry-leading discovery and dependency mapping workflows. This included: deployment of HP uCMDB and Universal Discovery, identification of the network ranges for discovery across multiple enterprise datacenter’s and 50+ individual sites. The team leveraged the discovered data and tied it to business entities within the organization through application mapping. The value from application mapping allowed to run what-if scenarios, known as impact analysis and view application to application dependencies via TCP traffic. ConfigureTek worked to ensure sustainability of the overall solution by providing, the customer with detailed knowledge transfer sessions on efficient use of the software and a maintaining smooth work process.
ConfigureTek’s Approach
ConfigureTek’s approach to this engagement was based around quick time-to-value. The team showed that project goals could be achieved by leveraging existing discovery credentials, allowing for the discovery of 19,000+ servers within a small period of time. The methodology included the following steps:
- Outline discovery requirements on day 1 and assist with credential permissions
- Identify other data repositories that could be integrated into the uCMDB
- Manage global discovery requirements including the different scheduling, access and related parameters of individual data centers using Management Zones
- Ensure the managers of the application owners understood the application mapping questionnaire and process to increase the efficiency of the task
Results
By the end of the project the client was empowered with:
- Global discovery across 19,000+ servers
- 100 Host-to-Host applications mapped
- Dynamic application mapping template and process
- Active Directory integration
- Integration with HP Storage Essentials
- Deep discovery of Oracle and MS-SQL instances, leveraged for cost analysis of each application
Contact the ConfigureTek team to better understand how we can leverage our experience and knowledge around this implementation to support your IT strategies.
