The Grid Advantage.com : Efficiency Boost Increases Customer Satisfaction

Efficiency Boost Increases Customer Satisfaction

Maryland-based Digex is a leading provider of application hosting services for businesses worldwide. Its 600 customers, which include some of the world's leading brand names, rely on Digex to deploy scalable, high-performing, critical applications on the Internet. Digex has operations in the United States, Europe and Pacific Rim, delivering consistently high-quality service through its trusted, secure, resilient infrastructure.

The company has achieved significant savings and productivity improvements since 2001 by automating the management of its customers' systems with Oracle Enterprise Manager. "Before Oracle Enterprise Manager, we had our own scripts and monitoring tools. The difficulty with that approach was that we could react only to problems rather than resolving them before they occurred," says Lee Harris, senior manager of Unix technical operations at Digex. "In addition to improving customer response times, Oracle Enterprise Manager enabled each DBA to manage 40 databases - double the industry average. It also allowed us to offer customers a choice of three service levels to meet their specific requirements."

In 2003, Digex upgraded to Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, Oracle's newest release, to drive DBA productivity higher and increase uptime and customer satisfaction. "The key criterion for our customers is performance, performance, performance," says Mark Cross, operations director of Digex. "Not meeting a service level agreement costs us money - but it could cost our customers many times that amount in terms of lost business. We need tools that work, are proactive and let us manage our customers' systems better than they could themselves - and better than our competitors can."

Digex rolled out Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control to its U.S. operations in June 2003. Within four months, Digex had put the system to work managing 103 databases on 55 Unix servers.

Total Solution
Digex evaluated leading management tools on the market but determined that Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control was the only solution capable of managing all parts of the technology stack simultaneously without lowering performance. "Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control simplifies every aspect of database management," Harris says. "This saves us money by enabling network management staff to undertake routine tasks. At the same time, its advanced, new, performance metrics mean that we can diagnose problems even faster and take managed hosting to another level."

Oracle also won out on service and assistance. "Oracle collaborates closely with users of Enterprise Manager to ensure that the functionality we need is incorporated into each new release," Harris says. "Oracle is committed to helping us do more with less."

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is easy and straightforward to install and configure, Digex reports. Few resources are needed to roll it out across an organization, and its out-of-the-box capabilities ensure that it delivers immediate benefits, such as delivering self-configuring agents to each database, which begin monitoring events automatically using preset Oracle metrics that correspond to the ones most frequently used by DBAs.

"With Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, agent deployment now averages 30 minutes, and in most cases it's less than 10," says Chuck Wolfe, senior principal DBA of Unix technical operations at Digex. "In previous versions we had to define performance metrics and thresholds ourselves. With this new version, rollout was faster and had a minimal impact on our operations. It enabled us to maintain our usual service levels with no disruption to customers."

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control's Web-based, intuitive management console replaces the client interface of earlier releases, giving DBAs access to the systems they manage from any location using a standard browser. Communication between each tier is via HTTP so DBAs have seamless access through firewalls. In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control's Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protects the integrity of customer data against unauthorized access by ensuring that sensitive information is encrypted and secure.

Improved Performance
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control allows DBAs to drill down directly from the HTML interface to get a complete view of performance at every level, from the network and operating system to the server, database and applications. New diagnostic capabilities enable administrators to identify bottlenecks quickly across multiple layers of technology. Problems are detected automatically through Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control's proactive "health advisories," which include recommendations for rapid resolution. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control has enabled Digex to reduce the time it takes to resolve a system performance problem from one hour to 15 minutes, cutting customer response time by 75 percent.

A configuration-management agent in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control automatically inventories deployed systems and tracks database metrics, allowing DBAs to compare configurations between two databases or hosts when problems occur. System patches can be downloaded from MetaLink, Oracle's around-the-clock support service, as required. "Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control gives us access to the configuration management agent from the same interface we use to diagnose database problems," Wolfe says. "This saves us the time it would take to log onto the machine and go through the standard operating system utilities."

"Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control's ease of use and built-in monitoring features made it possible for junior data center staff to undertake tasks previously required of our DBAs," Harris says. "This will allow us to increase the number of databases managed by each DBA from 40 to 68, an increase of 70 percent, and to grow our business without increasing our resources."

Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, Digex plans to offer a remote management service for clients that prefer to house their systems at their own premises. Digex also is considering end-to-end transaction monitoring as an enhanced service to customers.

Digex Corp.
Laurel, MD
http://www.digex.com
Industry: High Technology

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