Nonprofit Improves Services, Expects to Save Up to 1 Million with Monitoring Software

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1 Microsoft System Center Customer Solution Case Study Nonprofit Improves Services, Expects to Save Up to 1 Million with Monitoring Software Overview Country or Region: United Kingdom Industry: Nonprofit Customer Profile Home Group provides low-cost housing and social services to thousands of people in the United Kingdom. The Gosforth, U.K.-based company employs 4,000 workers and manages 52,000 homes. Business Situation The Home Group IT infrastructure was complex and expensive to maintain. A failed HP OpenView implementation left the organization desperate to gain insight into critical application services. Solution Home Group deployed Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to gain end-to-end oversight of its Windows Server and UNIX-based servers, smart phones, and other network devices. Benefits Dramatically improved service availability Savings of 1 million annually Improved compliance reporting [With System Center ] We ve moved from being a traditional IT department locked in a basement to being very customer-oriented and a business enabler instrumental in supporting business goals. Keith Woolley, IT Director, Home Group Home Group provides low-cost housing and social services in the United Kingdom, and wants to minimize operational costs so it has more to invest in services. After years of organic growth, the organization s IT infrastructure had become fragmented and dysfunctional. Home Group pruned its server count, upgraded its management software, and replaced HP OpenView with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 for server monitoring. With the last move, Home Group has brought its Windows Server- and UNIX-based servers under a single monitoring console and given the IT staff better insight into problems, which increases the availability of applications. Home Group estimates that infrastructure monitoring efficiencies will save up to 1 million (around U.S.$1.6 million) and simplify compliance reporting. The result is a better ability to provide attentive service to those in need.

2 Because we grew our infrastructure gradually, we ended up with a variety of equipment and software, most of which could not communicate with one another and all of which was difficult to monitor. Mark Robson, Systems Manager, Home Group Situation Home Group builds and manages low-cost housing in the United Kingdom and provides support services to help adults take control of their lives. The nonprofit manages 52,000 homes, provides care and support to more than 18,000 people each year, and has a turnover in excess of 230 million (about U.S.$377 million). Home Group is based in Gosforth, United Kingdom, and employs 4,000 people across England and Scotland. Mixed Infrastructure With 3.5 billion (U.S.$5.6 billion) worth of real estate to manage and more than 18,000 people to track, Home Group has gradually built up a significant technological infrastructure. By 2005, the company had accumulated 375 servers, the vast majority of which ran the Windows Server 2003 operating system. However, a critical housing and finance application ran on Sun servers using the Sun Solaris (UNIX) operating system and the open source Progress database program. Most of the servers were located in the Gosforth headquarters, but dozens were scattered across the United Kingdom in 500-plus Home Group neighborhood offices. Because we grew our infrastructure gradually, we ended up with a variety of equipment and software, most of which could not communicate with one another and all of which was difficult to monitor, says Mark Robson, Systems Manager in the Home Group IT Department. If a server failed, we couldn t identify the fault, and it took hours to return that server, and the applications running on it, to service. Impinged Ability to Help People in Need When servers or applications were down, the organization could not help people at times of urgent need. We had system outages every other week and wouldn t know about them until our service desk called, Robson says. Local-office staff would create paper workarounds to these system outages so they could help clients immediately; but, that made even more work for them, as they had to reenter the paper-based data once systems came online again. Infrastructure Overhaul In 2005, Home Group hired Keith Woolley as IT Director to bring order, reliability, and cost control to the organization s infrastructure. Because so many computers ran Microsoft software, Woolley turned to Microsoft for help in finding a partner that could help it devise a technology overhaul. Microsoft recommended Silversands, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the United Kingdom with deep infrastructure optimization experience. Silversands worked with Home Group to put together an infrastructure optimization road map. Through 2006, Home Group upgraded older server hardware, installed virtualization software, and consolidated 375 physical servers to 270 physical servers. The next step was to deploy a monitoring tool so Home Group could proactively monitor its servers and ensure that critical applications were available at all times. In 2007, Home Group evaluated several monitoring programs, including Microsoft Operations Manager, and ended up deploying HP OpenView as its Windowsbased server monitoring solution. Nearly all our servers were from HP, and we had read that OpenView was an industry leader, Robson says. But as we got underway, we found it to be inadequate. There was little to no support community, making it very difficult to find information. Every management pack cost extra, and, worse, the reporting was insufficient. You had to take bits and pieces of information

3 It s rare to search for information on an infrastructure program and have so many sources come up enthusiasts, bloggers, Microsoft experts, and others. Mark Robson, Systems Manager, Home Group and work it out yourself. It was not a holistic solution. Ultimately, Home Group decided that OpenView consumed so many network and staff resources that it was providing little value. Home Group was still unable to monitor the three UNIX-based servers running its housing and finance application. An expensive UNIX database administrator monitored these servers manually. Solution At that point, in January 2009, Silversands offered Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 as a server monitoring candidate. Silversands has been deploying Microsoft server management solutions since 2000 and has developed a unique methodology that puts business before technology. We do not approach System Center implementations as purely technical products, but we wrap business integration around them, taking into account people, processes, and technology working together, says Peter Mercieca, Microsoft Relationship Manager for Silversands. Robson agrees with that claim. We always want to follow Microsoft best practices, and Silversands not only had considerable experience with the technology, but also an understanding of deployment best practices, Robson says. We didn t want System Center Operations Manager to be a box that just sat in the corner. We wanted to understand how alerts and management packs were created, and how the program interacted with our applications and environment. Silversands gave us all that. Home Group was also impressed with the number of resources available for System Center Operations Manager. There is a huge Operations Manager community out there, which gave us lots of support, Robson says. It s rare to search for information on an infrastructure program and have so many sources come up enthusiasts, bloggers, Microsoft experts, and others. Plus, with OpenView, you had to constantly buy more management packs from HP; but with System Center Operations Manager, there are many free management packs online. Cross-Platform Monitoring Today, Home Group is monitoring 266 devices with System Center Operations Manager. The ability to manage every production server through System Center Operations Manager is a huge win for us, Robson says. We can now monitor our housing and finance application using automated tools and a single console. We know what s going on with this missioncritical application, so we can report back to the business about availability and performance issues. The housing and finance application has three tiers, the application itself running on Sun Solaris servers, a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise database, and Windows Server based Citrix servers. Troubleshooting problems with this application involves examining both Windows-based and Solaris servers, and now we can easily do that, Robson continues. Two teams look after the Windows and UNIX sides of the application, and they need to share information. Now everything needed by both teams is available on one screen. Mark Newton, Management Lead for Silversands, adds, It was a key requirement to deliver cross-platform monitoring for the important business systems at Home Group, and the R2 version could provide this important functionality through a single console. Granular Availability Tracking

4 We System hope Center to end up with 60,000 Operations devices Manager will connected help us squeeze to System up to Center another Operations 1 million out of Manager our infrastructure for a singlepane This is view a significant of all our costs. endpoints. amount of money This kind that of end-to-end we can plow oversight back into will housing help and Home assistance Group services. better fulfill its mission. Keith Woolley, IT Director, Home Group Mark Robson, Systems Manager, Home Group Home Group has used the application modeling capability in System Center Operations Manager to model 42 applications. With application models, the IT staff can monitor specific components of each application to precisely identify performance bottlenecks. Robson and Woolley are excited about creating service-level dashboards in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 where various business groups, such as those responsible for resident admissions, rental payments, and construction management, can monitor the performance of their own applications. Capturing service availability and performance for important services rather than specific hardware or applications has been a major benefit, Newton says. It adds an important holistic view to the IT team s delivery and helps them be service focused. Usability Features that Broaden Information Access The IT staff has also opened up infrastructure-health views to the IT service desk. We wanted to make sure that our service desk was up to speed on infrastructure issues so they could accurately respond to user calls for help, Woolley says. Robson learned about the System Center Operations Manager plug-in for Microsoft Office Visio 2007 drawing and diagramming software and used it to create a dashboard that lists all 42 applications and shows whether they are available or not. This one feature stops many calls from progressing to the IT staff, Woolley says. It gives service desk technicians a graphical view of our entire environment so that they can interpret alerts and better respond to callers. The IT professionals who use System Center Operations Manager report that it is far easier to learn than OpenView. Anyone who has used any Microsoft product, even Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, will find the interface familiar, Robson says. It s easy to author management packs ourselves, though we have found all we need from Microsoft and the online community. Interoperable Management Suite In addition to System Center Operations Manager, Home Group has deployed Microsoft mobile device management software, which it uses to manage its 2,000 smart phones through the same console used to manage all its other technology elements. It is also looking to deploy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, which will help the IT staff more efficiently configure and deploy operating systems and applications to 4,000 desktop and portable computers and more easily manage those systems. Lastly, Home Group is evaluating Microsoft System Center Service Manager to manage IT service-desk calls and link those calls to System Center Operations Manager. This linkage will enable the IT staff to relate incidents to problems and thus identify root causes faster. Benefits By deploying System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and other System Center solutions, Home Group has dramatically improved the availability of critical applications so it can better serve people in need. Infrastructure management efficiencies are expected to reduce IT costs by 1 million [U.S.$1.6 million], and easy data collection on IT systems will help with regulatory compliance. Dramatically Improved Service Availability

5 We hope to end up with 60,000 devices connected to System Center Operations Manager for a singlepane view of all our endpoints. This kind of end-to-end oversight will help Home Group... better fulfill its mission. Mark Robson, Systems Manager, Home Group With System Center, we have one interoperable platform that enables us to holistically link problems to devices anywhere in our organization so that we can solve problems faster and serve our customers better, Woolley says. We haven t had an application outage since deploying System Center Operations Manager, whereas previously we had system outages every other week. We ve moved from being a traditional IT department locked in a basement to being very customer-oriented and a business enabler instrumental in supporting business goals. Robson adds, Home Group has made a substantial investment in its infrastructure, and System Center Operations Manager is the final piece of the puzzle, helping us make sure that this investment is well managed and performing well. Before, we couldn t tell what our service availability was; now, we know exactly what s happening. We hope to end up with 60,000 devices connected to System Center Operations Manager for a single-pane view of all our endpoints. This kind of end-toend oversight will help us deliver security and continuity to the business so Home Group can better fulfill its mission. IT Management Savings of Up to 1 Million In the process of optimizing its IT infrastructure between 2007 and 2009, Home Group has recovered 4 million (U.S.$6.5 million) in operating costs by eliminating process waste, software license fees, excess and unstable hardware, and other improvements. System Center Operations Manager will help us squeeze up to another 1 million out of our infrastructure costs, Woolley says. We re a nonprofit; this is a significant amount of money that we can plow back into housing and assistance services. These savings will come from reducing full-time staff for server administration and service desk, proactive maintenance during times of low business use, removing emergency outages and IT overtime, and reducing worker relocation due to outages. Instead of looking through event logs and dealing with service tickets for minor issues, the IT staff can instead take a quick look at the System Center Operations Manager console to get an overview of panapplication health. We estimate that the use of System Center Operations Manager has reduced our infrastructure team s workload by 20 percent, Robson says. This timesaving will only increase as the IT staff deploys the System Center Operations Manager console to other teams such as the service desk. While the Visio dashboard gives the service desk staff a quick insight into whether an application is up or down, it still does not enable them to trace issues to the root cause. But with more complete insight, they will be able to take problem resolution further and relieve the IT staff of this work. By shifting more work from expensive IT staff to service-desk technicians, the IT staff can concentrate on problem management and big-ticket issues and move the smaller firefights to less expensive staff, Woolley says. For example, we ve freed our expensive UNIX specialist to be more focused on business solutions than spending his time trolling through event logs to understand outage issues. Robson says that the lavish amount of information available on System Center Operations Manager is also a big timesaver. The amount of information available out there is really impressive, he says. Microsoft has invested so much time in

6 For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: For more information about Silversands products and services, call or visit the Web site at: For more information about Home Group products and services, visit the Web site at: getting the Operations Manager team to blog and make information available that any challenge you face has probably been faced by someone else, and it s been solved. Another significant cost saving: licensing fees. OpenView was 10 times more expensive than System Center Operations Manager, Woolley says. The cost of OpenView was hundreds of thousands of pounds, while System Center Operations Manager is about 30,000. Improved Compliance Reporting As a nonprofit, Home Group is audited regularly by internal auditors and external governmental and industry auditing teams. The IT team was pulled away from operational duties to gather this information from multiple places. With the reporting capabilities we have with System Center Operations Manager, this information will be much easier to come up with, Robson says. It s simple to set up alerts to gather information such as failed logon attempts or accounts added to groups. Home Group can be even more transparent and accountable with less effort. Microsoft System Center System Center solutions help IT pros manage the physical and virtual information technology (IT) environments across data centers, client computers, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management solutions, IT organizations can be more productive service providers to their businesses. For more information on Microsoft System Center please visit: Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Windows Server 2003 Standard Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2007 Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Hardware HP ProLiant DL360, DL380, and DL580 servers Partners Silversands This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published February 2010