Server Manager 7

AON Consulting Success Story

Key benefits: - reduced administrative time and support expense
- better control of server and network performance
- improved network availability

"Server Manager is one of the rare programs that never crash. I don't think there's anything that can be compared to it. For the size of our company and the money we've to spend, it offered us the most utility for its price."

Jean-Francois Goulet
Network Administrator
AON Consulting, Montreal, Canada

Customer Background

Headquartered in Chicago, AON is a Fortune 500 company that is a world leader in risk management, retail, reinsurance and wholesale brokerage, claims management, specialty services, and human capital consulting services. With an employee base of 53,000 people working in 550 offices in more than 120 countries, AON had the 2001 annual revenue of over $7.6 billion

The Challenge

AON Canada's Novell network infrastructure comprises 15 servers and over 800 users, managed by 3 administrators in the central Montreal office, and 15 technicians in field locations. With offices and servers spread across Canada's vast territory, AON had no solution for centralized server monitoring and management. This meant AON IT technicians had no way of predicting, preventing and diagnosing network problems, which necessitated constant repair visits to remote sites whenever anything went wrong on the network.

After adopting NetWare 5.1 and 6, AON tested Server Manager 4.0 to find out that it offers the functionality needed to reduce and better justify travels to outside offices. It also turned out that Server Manager offers more in-depth, more proactive multi-server management capabilities, which can improve IT team's productivity and boost the NetWare stability

The AdRem Solution

Server Manager proved to be the critical tool for server diagnosing and troubleshooting.

"It gave me a quick real-time access to the information I need to troubleshoot server issues," explains Jean-Francois Goulet, administrator in charge of AON's Novell infrastructure.


"I can clearly see open files, loaded NLMs, active users and all vital performance metrics. To give you a practical example, we had a problem with FILESYS – it was using more and more memory and actually abended a server and Server Manager helped us figure out what the problem was immediately. What's more, I can even view the performance history, so if there was a server that crashed, I know at what time and what was the memory and processor utilization at that time. Once able to gather and study statistics for a day, week or month, we know where certain problems may occur in the future."

Unlike before, now AON administrators can perform operations between multiple servers at a time: compare NLMs and update server SET parameters, purge/salvage deleted files or distribute files and changes in text and configuration files. Mr. Goulet particularly liked Server Manager's config analyzer feature. Using it he can quickly compare and tweak configurations between severs, which gives him the assurance that all the servers across the whole network are up to date and that their configurations are unified.


"You can save a lot of time using Server Manager in terms of not having to travel. How? There's always some issue happening somewhere. Since I do most of the monitoring I can easily get the data that says there's really nothing on the server side and that the whole thing can be solved by the technicians on the site. I would say that this saves me about one day per month. Before that, it would often turn out we hadn't really needed to travel to a remote location and the problem could have been fixed on the phone."

Conclusion

"Server Manager is one of the rare programs that never crash. I don't think there's anything that can be compared to it. For the size of our company and the money we have to spend, it offered us the most utility for its price. We can buy huge, expensive software, but Server Manager was a good compromise for its price."