SandRidge Energy Selects Akorri BalancePoint

Akorri, Inc. announced that SandRidge Energy, Inc., an independent natural gas and oil company concentrating in exploration, development and production activities, has selected the company’s BalancePoint software to increase IT efficiency and save time by proactively preventing and resolving performance problems with its system-wide intelligence of the virtualized data center environment.

SandRidge deployed virtualization two years ago and has virtualized 60% of its application environment. Today, over 120 machines are running on nine physical hosts supported by NetApp storage. The complex environment made it challenging to troubleshoot performance problems using the existing element management tools. With BalancePoint’s ability to automatically correlate data and analyze interdependencies between resources in heterogeneous, distributed environments, SandRidge will be able to use this tool to monitor the entire environment as a system.

"In the past, when there has been a performance problem we had to consult four different tools to resolve issues," said Cameron Han, Senior Systems Engineer at SandRidge Energy. "We gather data from each tool and manually correlate it to identify a timeline of events and hopefully pinpoint the issue. This often takes a few systems engineers and up to a day to comb through the data and find the ‘needle in the haystack.’ We look forward to having Akorri’s BalancePoint increase our efficiency by doing this work for us, correlating and historically tracking the data."

"BalancePoint will give us a meaningful system-wide view of our server and storage environment, the majority of which is virtualized today," continued Han. "It is the only tool we found that can decipher our virtual machines, storage, and operating systems together. We like that it will proactively notify us of potential performance bottlenecks in our infrastructure."

"SandRidge Energy is an excellent example of an organization that had reaped rewards from virtualization, but needs a better way to manage and optimize its entire IT environment, with all of its virtual and physical server and storage components," said John Gavin, CEO and COO for Akorri. "We are confident that BalancePoint’s infrastructure-wide management will quickly make a positive difference in SandRidge’s IT efficiencies, helping them get greater ROI from their virtualized environment."

"Because of SandRidge’s extensive amount of virtualization, we needed to provide them with a management solution that could reveal how all of their resources were being utilized," said Lee Kessinger, Account Executive at Advanced Systems Group (ASG). "We determined that Akorri’s BalancePoint product was the best fit for SandRidge, both from a feature/function and price standpoint. After the initial evaluation period, SandRidge’s IT staff agreed."