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Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 03-2016    Views: 1590      






Management tools have helped Young's Seafood to improve support and response to storage issues, to the point where problems are often resolved before users are aware of them having arisen

Young's Seafood Limited is the leading UK fish and seafood processor, providing frozen and chilled, branded and retailer-branded fish. With a team of over 3,000 people across the UK and prepares over 300 million seafood dishes for UK consumers every year. Founded in 1805 and supplying many major retailers, Young's describe themselves as 'passionate about fish and excellent food values'.

Gary Allwood, IT Lead for Service Delivery and Operations Support at Young's Seafood, heads up the new internal IT Team and ensures that they provide the business with high quality IT services. As well as leading the teams and delivering all the day-to-day IT activities, Allwood is responsible for the management of suppliers and senior business stakeholders.

A FRESH CHALLENGE
Being a provider of chilled goods, the company is dependent on its IT systems for getting the goods out the door, so it is essential that Young's IT team has a responsive and pro-active approach to the delivery of IT services. Factories could still function without the network, but dispatching goods would become very difficult and additional costs would be incurred as a result of the manual processes, so an efficient network maintains Young's good reputation with its customers by ensuring that all goods are delivered accurately and on time.

WHY SOLARWINDS?
A number of solutions were reviewed as the new IT team was set up and SolarWinds came recommended as a well-recognised and proven product. Initial impressions suggested it was easy to use, had potential to deliver added benefits and covered everything Young's Seafood required from an IT management and monitoring solution.

SolarWinds enabled Young's Seafood to bring services in house rapidly, without disrupting service. In addition, with SolarWinds products already in place for the new team, a pro-active culture was immediately adopted allowing Young's IT team to deliver an improved service and report and demonstrate where improvements are being made. "We use a number of SolarWinds products at Young's," said Allwood. "We selected SolarWinds Storage Manager as it provides effective capacity management for Young's IT environment, and allows tighter controls, especially around the virtual environment."

Additional products that have been implemented by Young's Seafood include:

• SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor allows Young's IT team to respond quickly to alerts from all IT services and provides performance and hardware monitoring. It has also set-up the platform for Young's IT team to introduce application monitoring in the future.
• SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provides Young's IT team with an overview of the performance and availability of the network.
• SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer enables Young's IT team to deep dive into network utilisation, and find the root cause of issues.

NETTING A RESULT
SolarWinds has automated and simplified numerous manual operational processes in Young's Seafood's daily routine; it is now immediately apparent when a significant incident has occurred and the team can respond immediately.

"SolarWinds is very easy to set up, easy to use and has lots of potential," said Allwood. "It works very well, is easy to tweak and there are minimal training requirements. Each team holds a different view as to which features are most useful. The management team view availability reporting as the most useful, whilst the day-to-day operations teams see capacity disk and network monitoring as most useful."

Young's have a number of clocking terminals which, due to the age of the system in use, were being manually checked every hour or so. SolarWinds has allowed the company to automate the monitoring of these devices, for the first time, issuing an immediate alert when terminals fail. Young's IT team have real-time screens in support areas showing the health of all the IT systems at all of the company's sites, so issues or potential issues are immediately visible with both a screen notification and an email notification, which allows for a pro-active response.

"We have seen a reduction in the number of call-outs as we can clearly distinguish business critical issues," said Allwood. "While our systems are resilient, when a component fails SolarWinds allows us to react before the failure becomes an issue."

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
SolarWinds simplifies management of the estate, delivering real-time performance metrics and automated monitoring which has given Young's IT team a higher level of self-sufficiency, and reduced reliance on third parties. The Young's IT team has also automated a significant number of operational checks which previously were performed manually, freeing analysts to focus on service improvements.

SolarWinds has changed the way in which Young's IT team delivers service reports and support teams are able to respond much quicker than before. This has enabled Young's IT team to deliver a more pro-active service, and in many cases issues are fixed before colleagues are even aware there's a problem.
More info: www.solarwinds.com/uk

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