An integral facet of deploying an appliance, whether it is physical, virtual or cloud-based, is application management. Through enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) and OEMs to deploy secure and highly managed solutions across various types of environments, application performance management (APM (News - Alert)) services typically encompass functionalities related to application control, automating OS and patch deployment, support processes, and even ramping up the time it takes to deliver, maintain and support these applications that are key to the lifeblood of global companies.
In a recent article, the sheer vitality of APM tools was highlighted through two distinct case studies.
The first case study focused on defense contracting company VSE Corporation, a company that opened its doors back in 1959 under a different name, which was continuously finding itself plagued by newly enacted mandates and federal regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Along with its plans to relocate its headquarters and develop a virtualized data center, the firm wanted to enact a scalable strategy that could help ensure that all of its servers were working in as optimal a fashion as possible and no data was being lost when making the transition to the new center.
It was ultimately decided that an offering that could accurately monitor changes within the corporate network and highlight small problems before they became major issues was needed, and by teaming with Evovlen and leveraging its APM suite, it was able to cut down the amount of system management tools it utilized on a daily basis as well as reduce the time it took for them to work by replacing the separate units with a single platform.
“We had one dynamic link library (DLL) that didn’t transition properly ,and Evolven helped identify the problem immediately – something my engineers told me would have required at least five hours of their time otherwise,” said Dave Chivers, vice president and CIO of VSE, in a statement.
On the other hand, medical records portal Practice Fusion found itself required to eliminate issues plaguing the organization daily, which predominantly related to management challenges, monitoring and measuring instances such as infrastructure performance, user experience, and service level governance.
Launched back in 2008 and currently serving nearly 150,000 healthcare providers, the business needed to deploy an appliance in a short period time and eventually decided on ExtraHop’s Application Delivery Assurance system.
“We really started to take off in terms of growth about two years ago and at that time a decision was made to invest in infrastructure and move from a private Rackspace (News - Alert) deployment to a co-location data center,” added John Hluboky, vice president of technical operations at Practice Fusion.
Besides seeing benefits such as increased performance, enhanced availability monitoring, better visibility and real-time SSL decryption, the ExtraHop appliance was easily deployed and up and running right away.
“In terms of monitoring, if something is rogue or if something is performing outside of its expected communication pathway, [the system] will flag it,” said Hluboky.
A crucial part of powering any APM product is partnering with an appliance deployment specialist who boasts years of experience in successfully solving the security, reliability and other complexities that can be experienced throughout various types of deployments. Today just may be your lucky day because UNICOM (News - Alert) Engineering’s Application Management offering is highlighted as being an “integral part of delivering network-ready, lifecycle-managed appliance platforms.”
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Edited by Blaise McNamee