Leading home-building company leverages database maintenance & support operations to reduce cost and improve efficiency
Patni's remote infrastructure management services enable leading home building company to reduce database maintenance & support costs and enhance customer satisfaction
The Client
Centex Corporation is a residential construction company engaged in home building, also offering mortgage, title and insurance services with operations spread across 26 states in the US.
The Challenge
The network infrastructure at Centex centers around 53-Production, 14-Pre- Production and 35-Non-Production Servers spread across two domains. Performance and event monitoring tools such as SCOM and MOM were used in managing the IT infrastructure environment and for issuing alert notifications.
Support for the databases (SQL Server 2000 & 2005) was only available 8X5 and the primary requirement was to extend support coverage well beyond business hours to 16X5 which would prevent down time and impediments creeping into the system and ensure optimum system performance and availability. The support coverage included a slew of manual database monitoring activities such as daily monitoring, heath checks, troubleshooting, resolution for alerts, maintenance of databases, performance tuning, documentation etc. Centex's requirement was to find a viable and cost-effective solution to manually monitor 100+ Production servers (53) twice and nonproduction (49) servers once per shift. Database administration and database application support are essentially two different tasks usually undertaken by two different groups. However, considering Patni's expertise in these areas, its DBA team took up the challenge to support both the areas. Centex currently uses the BMC Remedy Service tool for ticketing purpose and there was a requirement for a new ticket to be created and assigned to the respective DBA or database application contact for each production and pre-production incident.
The Solution
After scouting the market, the client partnered with Patni thanks to its proven expertise in providing remote infrastructure management services. There was a great deal of complexity in monitoring 100+ Production servers (53) twice and non-production (49) servers once per shift. Compounding this was the manual monitoring process which was time-consuming. Because of its expertise in Database Administration and support, Patni's offshore team recommended automation of repetitive tasks.
As a result few tasks such as health checks were automated and further tasks are on the verge of automation thus saving valuable time to carry out other performance enhancing activities within the project. Tickets for all events, incidents and problems were generated and assigned to Patni's on-call support personnel for resolution and then re-routed to the relevant teams as Patni did not have direct access to the production servers.
The Benefits
Patni's solution has enabled the client to control its infrastructure management function while eliminating day-to-day management & mundane tasks, and high labor & maintenance cost. It has eliminated the need for additional investment in an internal management platform, mitigated risks and increased operational efficiencies thanks to Patni's proven expertise and versatile skill sets. Automation and SQL query optimization/ tuning has improved the efficiency and saved considerable time providing considerable extra time for performing value added services like Database Performance, drives spaces etc. As a result of the trust and goodwill earned, Patni will have complete access to Centex's production servers and will be the primary DBA support for all (102) servers. Other benefits to the client include:
Considerable savings in time and improved efficiency due to automation and SQL query optimization
Reduced monitoring time from 7 to 5 hours
Automation of tasks such as health checks
The Technology
Operating systems:
Ticketing tool:
Database:
SQL Server 2000
SQL Server 2005