Agency for Asylum Seekers Keeps Critical Applications Running with HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix

Challenge

When you’re in the business of helping asylum seekers, you want to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. For Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), which receives, assists and houses tens of thousands of seekers in the Netherlands, this includes making sure the underlying technology systems that employees depend on are always up and properly running.

To help make this possible, in 2016 COA deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, a hype converged platform that simplifies and speeds operations by combining storage, servers, networking and security in one solution.

COA relies on its Nutanix environment—comprising about 50 nodes and 560 virtual machines—to run mission-critical applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Citrix VDI and Skype for Business. “It’s important that we keep Nutanix available and healthy. When an application hiccups or experiences latency, we need to find the cause and fix it right away so it doesn’t interrupt users. However, that was sometimes easier said than done,” said Pim van Luttervelt, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Administrator for COA.

Solution

According to van Luttervelt, “We needed a monitoring solution that would be as powerful, fast and simple as our hyperconverged system, and provide great visibility into our Nutanix stack. HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix perfectly fulfilled those requirements.”

HYCU MP for Nutanix is the only solution that extends SCOM to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, delivering a complete picture of Nutanix’s health, availability, infrastructure and application performance. It proactively monitors everything from Nutanix clusters, blocks, hosts and disks, to virtual machines, storage pools, containers and data protection. Additionally, it automatically detects the applications running within each virtual machine and logically groups virtual machines together.

Benefits

Gains Key Insights

HYCU’s dashboards provide at-a-glance intelligence on all Nutanix components that affect COA application performance and availability.

“The centralized, holistic views HYCU MP provides are extremely helpful. They give me insights into Nutanix that as a SCOM administrator I never had before,” said van Luttervelt. “By having one management pack to monitor all of Nutanix, we’re able to get an instant health assessment of the entire environment on a single screen, and quickly drill down into individual components when needed.”

Prevents Problems

Because HYCU MP is natively integrated with SCOM, it’s easy for administrators to proactively manage their environment without having to learn new technologies. Using the SCOM system they know so well, COA staff can anticipate resource bottlenecks that could slow applications and then, for instance, resize application VMs or extend Nutanix by adding more CPU or storage to eliminate pending problems.

According to Halbe Boomsma, Nutanix Administrator, COA, “I’m impressed with how simple it is to find TOP VMs with high CPU or IOPS. Having this critical information enables me to advise application owners about specific actions to prevent problems.”

Speeds Troubleshooting

“HYCU MP makes it easy to pinpoint where issues are and, just as importantly, where they aren’t, so we can get to the heart of the problem faster,” said van Luttervelt.

In addition, by leveraging the MP’s automatic alerts, which monitor more than 250 scenarios and provide resolution steps, COA’s Nutanix administrator can quickly take the right corrective actions and speed Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

You can download the case study here: 

About the customer

COA, or Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers, manages the reception and supervision of people seeking asylum in the Netherlands.

To learn how HYCU can help your Nutanix, Azure or Google Cloud Platform backup strategy, visit www.hycu.com or email info@hycu.com.