Grenoble École de Management gains real-time visibility of critical applications

Business issue

With two data centers and approximately 200 servers, most of which are virtualized, the institution relies heavily on Wi-Fi to support its remote, e-learning management programs. Quality of service (QoS) issues, due to a WAN migration, resulted in network performance degradations. The institution did not have a set of relevant measurements and tools to troubleshoot and resolve degradations and user complaints. The institution also lacked the in-house skills to address issues around its database applications: applications that were critical to most end-users, especially those who are e-learners.

Solution benefits

By implementing the Skylight solution, Grenoble School of Management was able to:

• Accelerate the diagnosis and repair of performance degradations
• Gain real-time visibility by proactively monitoring critical systems and applications
• Reduce risk exposure due to degradations in network and application performance
• Measure reliably and independently the quality of all WAN links while providing insight on all WAN flows

Business value and ROI

Since the solution was put in place, Grenoble School of Management has achieved or surpassed all business objectives and targets:

• Optimized capacity planning by helping to ensure continuous data replication between two data centers. An existing data synchronization tool (DoubleTake) offered a less sophisticated, higher cost capacity planning tool that was not vendor-neutral. Skylight offered 360° visibility into bandwidth utilization, validated time windows, and ensured VoIP traffic flowed without degradations or bottlenecks.
• With over 1,000 simultaneous connections over the Wi-Fi architecture, disconnections happened frequently. Skylight offered in-depth visibility inherently critical to identifying problem origination. The result was expedited problem resolution that drives greater productivity and reduced cost.
• Defined baselines for critical CRM and database application performance by measuring end-user response times (EURT) so as to monitor and troubleshoot performance. Expanded to include all applications.
• The rollout of the Skylight solution allowed for full visibility across multiple locations and a distributed infrastructure, generating a significant return on investment.