Case studies in network and systems management

Computerworld - These case studies exemplify how corporate IT departments are using new tools and approaches to managing their networks and servers.

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, a unit of Mandarin Oriental International Ltd., Hong Kong

Mission: Owner and operator of 18 luxury hotels on three continents, in locations such as Hong Kong, London, Geneva, Bermuda, Bangkok and Singapore.

Challenge: As the hotel chain grew from its Asian base to other continents, it needed a way to manage its growing network, build its infrastructure quickly and remain agile -- with little capital investment, says Nick Price, director of technology (the equivalent of a CIO) at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in Hong Kong.

Technology: To meet those goals, the hotel group decided to outsource network management to InteQ Corp., a managed services provider in Bedford, Mass. The vendor's InfraService offering monitors the hotel group's servers, applications and network devices and remotely resolves problems. (The hotel group uses an Internet-based virtual private network because of the geographic dispersion.) The Web-based interface provides a window to how the network is doing, offers real-time alerts and demonstrates the value of the service to upper management.

Payoff: "InteQ did what would have taken us two years to do," says Geoff McClelland, vice president of technology for hotel development, based in Sydney, Australia. And it would be hard for the hotel group to maintain the high-caliber staff expertise that InteQ has, McClelland adds.

Intellinex LLC, an independent business unit launched by Ernst & Young International, Cleveland

Mission: Intellinex provides sophisticated online and multimedia educational programs for major corporate clients.

Challenge: An e-learning division that catered to 30,000 people within Ernst & Young was spun off into a company serving 175,000 people -- but its IT infrastructure couldn't handle that scale, says Mark Bockeloh, Intellinex's chief technology officer, who is based in Las Calinas, Texas. The training programs are full of multimedia content such as streaming video, and have complex, dynamic features like bookmarking the student's place in an online course and providing different paths through the course depending on how the student answers the questions. In addition, there are registration and scheduling chores.

Technology: Intellinex obtained San Mateo, Calif.-based MetiLinx Inc.'s iSystem Enterprise server optimization and management software. The suite determines the transaction mix on the servers and optimizes the traffic in real time, finding the best route and the best server to handle it, Bockeloh says. "It routes the work to the server with the greatest health, which might be Machine 10 in Miami, and then routes it to Miami," he says.

Payoff: The result of the optimization is "46% more throughput, and no downtime," Bockeloh says, "and that means I don't need 46% more hardware."

Sony Online Entertainment Inc., San Diego
Mission: This online gaming division of Sony Corp. runs "massively multiplayer" online games -- including the blockbuster EverQuest -- with more than 13 million registered users.

Challenge: Sony Online has more than 1,500 servers and 100,000 simultaneous players across three continents. The company needed a network monitoring tool that was inexpensive, easy to configure, easy to manage and easy to blend with custom applications that the gaming network uses, says Adam Joffe, vice president of IT. "Our custom applications wouldn't fit real well with any of the standard network-monitoring packages that are out there," he explains.

Technology: Sony Online selected NetVigil from Fidelia Inc. in Princeton, N.J. NetVigil is flexible and has open application programming interfaces "so we could plug in our own custom monitoring tools," Joffe says.

Payoff: NetVigil was a better choice than larger network management packages, Joffe says. "They would have been overkill, and we'd have paid an awful lot of money for only certain features. NetVigil gives us a broad view of all of our devices -- host and network devices. Other packages do either the network well or the host well, but not necessarily both," he says.

Read more about networking and internet in Computerworld's Networking and Internet Knowledge Center.