A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Atos controls IT remotely with Avocent® solutions from Emerson
Network Power
In the past, the outsourcing specialist Atos also used on-site administrators to manage
IT in its data centers and server rooms. This led to high travel costs, especially during
vacation times or when extra technical staff members were required on-site during
project or implementation phases. Now, a total of around 1,500 IT components at 11
sites—and counting—are operated securely and location-independently by Atos via
a remote management solution created by Emerson Network Power which consists
of Avocent DSView™ 3 management software, KVM switches, serial console servers,
service processor managers and power distribution units (PDUs).
The simple fact that Atos is the official “worldwide IT partner of the Olympic
Committee” and has landed the biggest IT contract in sporting history is a sure sign
that the IT service provider has got the monitoring, operation and management of
its IT components under complete control. As an outsourcing specialist and service
provider, the success of both Atos and its clients ultimately depends on the seamless
management of IT infrastructure.
Company
Atos
Location
Essen, Germany
“Emerson Network Power presented Avocent and the most
comprehensive, complete solution which was clearly going
to give us more than using KVM switches alone or other
manufacturers’ PDUs.”
– Lukas Lange, Technical Engineer, Atos
Industry
Technology
Web Site
www.atos.net
Applications
DSRTM KVM over IP switches
DSViewTM 3 management software
ACS advanced console server
MergePointTM service processor manager
Avocent PDUs
In the past, IT was independently managed on-site by staff in data centers and server
rooms spread across Germany using a variety of software tools and switches.
“Before, there was no comprehensive uniform strategy for managing the IT
infrastructure,” says Lukas Lange, Technical Engineer for Windows OS Infrastructure
Services at the company headquarters in Essen. “Sometimes colleagues found
it difficult to support decentralized sites because there was no comprehensive
implementation of remote access. This often involved travel time and costs if a
specialist was needed at another site or one administrator had to fill in for another,
especially during vacation times or during project or implementation phases.”
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Cross-site access to the whole IT infrastructure
Importing data remotely using virtual media
It was obvious that they needed to find a complete solution for managing
the IT infrastructure and to give the IT team location-independent,
remote access to servers and components. During the selection process,
several manufacturers presented their proposals, and subsequently,
testing took place at the Nuremberg and Essen data centers. The most
important selection criteria were scalability, price/performance ratio and
the possibility of deploying the solutions comprehensively across all sites.
All of the technical engineers at Atos who are responsible for server and
storage support and maintenance are able to operate the distributed
infrastructure remotely and can even access the IT equipment up to
BIOS level. The browser-based user interface of DSView 3 software
serves as a central starting point for the maintenance of all servers and IT
components. The virtual media function of the KVM switches is especially
helpful, because it allows content from locally or externally connected
CD-ROM drives or USB keys to be copied to the target server virtually.
Emerson Network Power made a bid that combined the Avocent
DSView 3 management software, DSR™ KVM over IP switch, ACS
advanced console server, MergePoint™ service processor manager and
PDUs and won.
“Emerson Network Power presented Avocent and the most
comprehensive, complete solution which was clearly going to give us
more than using KVM switches alone or other manufacturers’ PDUs,”
explains Lange, whose department is responsible for supporting and
maintaining the Avocent solution. The DSView 3 management software
offers consolidated and uniform access to all remote management
interfaces in real time. It also allows easy and efficient administration
of the DSR switch, ACS console server, MergePoint service processor
manager and PDUs used in remote management.
The new network architecture, allowing remote access to the devices, was
installed first in combination with independent installations of the DSView
3 management software at sites in Essen, Frankfurt and Nuremberg.
As part of the organization’s realignment, the IT teams across Germany
were merged, which also led to a consolidation of the infrastructure.
So, with the help of more than 85 KVM switches, serial console servers,
service processor managers and PDUs for power management, a total of
approximately 1,500 components in six of the central data centers and
five of Atos’s decentralized server rooms are being centrally managed
using the software.
Lange says, “But we imagine that number is going to increase quickly,
since our virtual servers and other IT sites could be added in the near
future. At the moment, we have 5,000 components licensed, so there’s
plenty of capacity for growth.”
“This makes it so much easier to manage systems in terms of oncall services or for smaller server rooms which don’t have an on-site
administrator,” Lange says. “During vacation times in particular, our team
has to be able to work location-independently in order to maintain our
clients’ environments at other sites. If an administrator in Essen is on-call
for several sites at the same time, he can access all the IT equipment
through a single interface, whether in Essen, Frankfurt or Nuremberg,
unlike before when an administrator had to be on-site or use isolated
applications which were not rolled out uniformly and used different
standards. That’s why the remote solution will pay off quickly, just in the
travel and administration expenses we save.”
In the future, more sites will be connected to the new architecture,
which is expected to further increase the number of installed remote
management components, in particular the number of MergePoint
service processor managers and PDUs.
“The incorporation of additional IT is just a question of time, even if
we haven’t yet reached a final decision regarding exactly what the
implementation will look like,” concludes Lange. “With our Avocent
remote IT infrastructure management solution from Emerson Network
Power, we can we can flexibly integrate new systems any time—without
increasing complexity. Plus, we’ll test the extent to which the Emerson
Network Power solutions can be used in the future for capacity planning
and comprehensive data center infrastructure management.”
Emerson Network Power.
The global leader in enabling Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
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the Avocent logo, DSR, DSView and MergePoint are trademarks of Avocent Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
0911-ATOS-CS-EN