Austrian Lotteries Selects Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments Corporation
announced that Austrian Lotteries has selected VirtualWisdom to improve storage
operations and datacenter reliability.

A commercial
organization with revenues of over €2.6 billion in 2010, Austrian Lotteries
also raises funds for sports and charities in a similar way to other lotteries
in Europe, and has nearly 500 employees. Players can register to play a range
of online games including Lotto, Toto (a pooled football game), instant games
and Bingo. To enable this broad range of offerings, the organization runs a
network of terminals to cater to customers located across Austria and manages
over 150TB of data. In order to maintain the level of
service its customers have come to expect, Austrian Lotteries treats data
security, system reliability, response time, and business continuity as
priorities.

To support
this organization, its IT department runs two datacenters, both based near
Vienna. Within these datacenters are several HP storage systems and
approximately 600 Brocade switch ports. As all IT transactions are processed
through both datacenters, a reliable storage infrastructure which ensures uninterrupted
flow of all IT operations is key.

Following an evaluation of several options, Austrian Lotteries’ team selected a
Virtual Instruments solution comprising VirtualWisdom software and SANInsight
monitoring hardware. This has given the customer a level of visibility into its
SAN that it had never experienced before, one that has brought
benefits to the organization. VirtualWisdom checks each data packet going
through the FC SAN enabling the IT administrators to analyze the
storage I/O with real-time granularity. It was important
to be able to detect any application performance degradation before affecting
users and this hardware/software combination
identifies failures of connected devices. VirtualWisdom also spots overloaded
ports or non-authorized traffic and monitors storage I/O data from the server
to the storage volume to deliver detailed analysis.

VirtualWisdom
monitors switch performance in real-time, allowing the IT team to set
individual thresholds and alerts and to get overall view of the
health of their SAN fabric. Unlike competing alternatives, the Virtual
Instruments solution checks all switches in the SAN, irrespective of vendor;
once a highly utilized or underutilized port is detected, the administrator is
able to balance the load, avoiding performance bottlenecks.
Furthermore, VirtualWisdom detects failed multi-pathing links and identifies
sub-optimized links. With VirtualWisdom, IT administrators can analyze
historical performance trending, plan SAN capacity planning, and
design optimal backup scenarios.

"We use VirtualWisdom and SANInsight
monitoring products to get a detailed and comprehensive view of our SAN
performance so that we can take the necessary steps before performance
degradation occurs. This ensures that neither the infrastructure nor the
processes are affected," says Erich Eckel, IT Manager at Austrian
Lotteries. "With the data provided
by Virtual Instruments we can now make informed decisions to maximize
utilization, availability and performance on every level of our infrastructure
such as networks, servers, and storage. This has simplified our storage
management enormously."

Virtual
Instruments has also reduced the amount of time it takes to identify
non-critical failures from days to hours and sometimes even minutes; for the
gambling organization it is now possible to run an analysis and to find a
solution long before a field engineer arrives. As a result, any potential
downtime of the production system is reduced to a minimum. This has allowed the
IT team to guarantee uninterruptible operation of their IT infrastructure and
ensure business continuity.

"Our
business is gaming but when talking about IT, you should never rely on luck but
on solid solutions like VirtualWisdom. There was no real alternative for us;
storage vendors provide tools which mainly monitor information within their
systems but not across the entire SAN. It was important for us to get vendor-neutral
performance data on a server to LUN basis. Virtual Instruments was the only
vendor to provide this data at the level of detail we need," continued
Eckel.

"Austrian Lotteries chose VirtualWisdom
because of its ability to offer independent monitoring and analysis, real-time
reporting and for its ease of integration into the existing datacenters,"
said Philip Maurer, Account  Manager at
Virtual Instruments’ channel partner LB Systems. "From implementation through to production the process was quick and
seamless. The advantages of having a complete, granular and real-time view of
the SAN have once again proven invaluable."

"Time and time again we have been told by our
customers of the importance of being able to view and analyze the entire,
multi-vendor SAN rather than individual components," said Chris James,
EMEA Marketing Director, at Virtual Instruments. "A network is more than the sum of its parts and should be monitored
comprehensively. With VirtualWisdom we allow organizations to see inside their
SANs and see exactly what is going on in real-time."