KÖTTER Services gets proactive with data center management

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KÖTTER group has its roots in a security services company founded more than 75 years ago. KÖTTER’s business areas include personal security, security technology, cleaning and personnel services, as well as facility services. KÖTTER Services stands for service quality, whether customers choose a single service or an integrated project service for complex system solutions. With more than 90 offices in more than 50 locations in Germany, employing 13,500 people, KÖTTER achieved group-wide sales of EUR303 million in 2010.

KÖTTER group has its roots in a security services company founded more than 75 years ago. KÖTTER’s business areas include personal security, security technology, cleaning and personnel services, as well as facility services. KÖTTER Services stands for service quality, whether customers choose a single service or an integrated project service for complex system solutions. With more than 90 offices in more than 50 locations in Germany, employing 13,500 people, KÖTTER achieved group-wide sales of EUR303 million in 2010.

In recent years, the company has grown significantly, and its IT environment has expanded. Its main systems include a VMware environment that supports Microsoft Windows applications, which runs on IBM System x3650 and IBM BladeCenter HS22 servers, and an IBM i environment that runs on IBM Power Systems servers and IBM JS12 blades.

The importance of availability
“It is vital to maintain availability in both the VMware and IBM i environments, because security is a 24/7 business and our users need access to their applications at all times,” explains Andrea Cicchirillo, IT Project Manager at KÖTTER Services. “Hardware maintenance is absolutely critical to availability, so we used to spend about an hour every day in the data center, checking each server to make sure everything was working properly. If something went wrong overnight, we might not notice until the next morning, so there was a risk of downtime.”

The company wanted to become more proactive about server maintenance, and IBM suggested implementing IBM Systems Director. The software was installed and configured to monitor the company’s VMware/Microsoft Windows servers within one week.

“The real advantage of IBM Systems Director is that it monitors each server down to component level,” explains Andrea Cicchirillo. “If a redundant component fails—for example, one disk within a RAID array—you might not notice it. But if you don’t fix it and a second disk fails, you would have real problems! With IBM Systems Director, we get much better visibility of the status of every component, so we can react immediately and resolve issues before they actually affect the business.”

Monitoring and automation
When an issue is detected, IBM Systems Director automatically notifies the relevant members of KÖTTER’s IT team by email—and in the event of major issues such as component failure, it also contacts IBM to request additional support or hardware replacements. This enables rapid response to problems, even outside normal office hours.

“IBM Systems Director helps us achieve our system availability targets and saves a great deal of time for the IT team,” says Andrea Cicchirillo. “We don’t need to visit the data center every day, saving about 30 hours per month that we can spend on more valuable tasks. This equates to a productivity increase of more than 10 percent for the server management team.”

Looking to the future
The next step for KÖTTER will be to extend the solution to manage the servers in its IBM i environment, and its storage systems.

“IBM Systems Director is capable of monitoring many different types of hardware and providing a single point of control,” says Andrea Cicchirillo. “This is a significant benefit for companies like ours that have a heterogeneous IT infrastructure.”

He concludes: “In future, we would like to introduce SMS alerts as a backup communication channel. We are also interested in integrating other monitoring products to provide performance indicators such as memory and processor usage. Increasing our use of monitoring and automation software will help us improve productivity in the IT department and provide an even better service to the business.”