Marcum Managed NetApp Monitor+ Services
ABOUT THE CLIENT
The mission of this state entity is to promote a vigorous and growing state economy, encourage business investment and job creation, and support diverse, prosperous local economies across the state through the efficient use of loans, grants, tax credits, real estate development, marketing, and other forms of assistance.
THE CHALLENGE
The client had a need to reduce its overall IT costs and shift internal staffing from managing day-to-day storage needs and its virtual environment to focus on the IT needs of individual lines of business in support of key strategic initiatives. The client was looking for a managed services provider to manage 18 ESXi hosts running VMware, two vCenter appliances, and two NetApp High Availability (HA) storage filers across two locations, supporting a virtualized application for a critical line of business. Marcum supplied a robust storage monitoring and management solution that included remote monitoring and alerting, remote patching and administration of the Netapp OnTap, and VMware configuration modifications.
THE GOAL
Our client sought to achieve three critically important IT objectives:
- Engage an IT provider capable of supporting, monitoring and managing its storage and virtualized compute environment, enabling it to focus on business applications. The provider had to be capable of provisioning, managing, and protecting VMs and storage across both client locations.
- Reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) day-to-day storage and compute infrastructure issues and problems, and increase client customer satisfaction.
- Find a partner that could utilize software management tools to provide insights for better-informed storage and compute decisions, and to boost performance, resilience, and protection.
THE SOLUTION/OUTCOME
Marcum proposed a solution providing remote resolution of infrastructure and storage errors and configuration issues via the Marcum Network Operation Center (NOC). Marcum utilized a variety of software automation tools to simplify storage operations. A detailed, real time analysis was performed to help gauge the performance and health of monitored clusters with recommended actions and solutions for identified problems which allows Marcum to create custom reports to meet specific client needs.
Lastly, to improve efficiency, Marcum automated many time-consuming, complex processes and created storage workflows for the most frequent tasks and made them available for one-click automation. By taking advantage of the NetApp network management tools, Marcum was able to adhere to NetApp data management best practices in storage management operations and provide the client with the outcome it was looking for.