Server Manager 7

PTK Centertel's IDEA - Success Story

Key benefits:- reduced cost of server management
- improved IT staff productivity
- increased availability of corporate IT infrastracture

"(Using Server Manager), now we can detect and react to network problems early enough, and keep down the time spent on routine management chores."

Konrad Kobylecki
Head of IT Department
PTK Centertel's IDEA, Warsaw, Poland

Customer Background

In recent years, the cellular phone has turned from a luxury yet cumbersome gadget to a ubiquitous tool used in daily work, communication and entertainment. Among Poland's three mobile phone network operators, PTK Centertel is the only operator of a dual-band mobile network, which consists of the analog PTK Centertel network and the digital IDEA network. Thanks to the company's commitment to maintaining a high level of customer service and developing diversified offerings for individuals and businesses, PTK Centertel has invariably pioneered mobile communications in Poland. Today PTK Centertel's IDEA network can boast a customer base of over 4.5 million and a powerful sales distribution comprising several thousand outlets in Poland

The Challenge

PTK Centertel's IT infrastructure connects the company's headquarters with several dozen local offices spread throughout Poland, offering its employees continuous on-line access to key services and applications (billing systems, management systems, etc.). Additionally, in all major offices local servers provide access to files, printers and email.

Due to the increasing complexity and size of Centertel's IT infrastructure, the company's employees found themselves pressed for time and financial resources necessary to accomplish their daily and long-term objectives. As a result, PTK Centertel realized the necessity to implement a reliable system for central server management that would allow administrators to monitor and troubleshoot strategic network resources while boosting availability and performance of the company's crucial servers.

Seeking to meet these goals, PTK Centertel started searching for a solution for monitoring and managing NetWare servers that would:

  • provide immediate remote access to servers over the WAN network, which would eliminate the need to travel to remote locations
  • provide immediate remote access to servers over the WAN network, which would eliminate the need to travel to remote locations
  • permit the central management of servers and users from company headquarters and regional offices
  • automate time-sensitive administrative tasks
  • offer low footprint and top performance over slow WAN connections.

The AdRem Solution

"AdRem Server Manager definitely met our expectations. Using it in our daily operations we can perform numerous tasks quicker and easier," says Milosz Ignatowski of PTK Centertel. "The program incorporates many extremely useful functions which were, so far, only available in various different applications. It also offers unique features, like multi-server management, which means we can distribute files to many servers at a time. Before Server Manager we had to do these things manually on each server," Ignatowski continues.

PTK Centertel's administrators liked the fact that it is installed remotely to the client side without the need to access the physical server. This way the program instantly became a full-fledged tool for monitoring user activity and server performance. As an example Ignatowski quoted the fact that "with Server Manager even a rookie can monitor critical parameters of many servers simultaneously, including number of active connections and opened files, packets sent/received, processor utilization, and so on. Besides that, one can quickly find users which bog down the disk space, or easily control access rights to files or directories. With other tools, like ManageWise, these kinds of things were virtually a mission impossible."

Given the large size of PTK Centertel's network, another important aspect of Server Manager is that most operations are executed on the client side, which results in the program consuming the absolute minimum of network bandwidth. Konrad Kobylecki, Head of PTK Centertel's IT Department, welcomed the ability to automate some labor-intensive tasks and the fact that the program "eases trend collecting and the viewing of stats on server's key system parameters." As a result, one can detect and anticipate potential trouble spots and make informed decisions on the evolution of the network

Conclusion

"AdRem Server Manager relieved our IT staff of many server management burdens," concludes Ignatowski. "Now we can detect and react to network problems early enough, and keep down the time spent on routine management chores. At that stage it's hard to crunch the exact numbers, but I'm strongly convinced we've managed to cut down on NetWare server maintenance costs, and improve the reliability and accessibility of PTK Centertel's server infrastructure."