Extending Data Center Performance Monitoring with Software-Based Smart Visibility
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
- nGenius® for Flows
- InfiniStreamNG™ hardware appliances
- vSTREAM™ Embedded
- nGenius Collector Virtual Appliance
Tech Stack
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- VMware
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Applicable Industries
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Fleet Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is a government agency with a strong “protect and serve” component of their mission. This agency is so laser-focused on that mission, it puts them in a unique position even among government agencies. In order to successfully execute its mission, the agency depends upon the skill and talents of thousands of employees and contractors, coupled with highly secure, state-of-the-art information technology to provide up-to-date and completely accurate information on a 24x7x365 basis at hundreds of centralized and remote facilities. The agency is a NETSCOUT® customer of several years, with their information technology (IT) team relying on the next-generation nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for continuous visibility and monitoring of its network and application environment.
The Challenge
The agency's mission success depends largely on quickly and successfully analyzing large volumes of data to safeguard national interests, government assets, and global citizens. To ensure the success of their mission, the agency developed and deployed an application suite that provides the ability to quickly extract meaningful analysis from always-growing data volumes. Wanting to more nimbly spin-up compute and storage resources to support these mission-critical applications and newly developed apps, a strategic decision was made to embrace recent digital transformation innovations by consolidating existing data center operations and transitioning to a commercial cloud service provider (CSP) service. As part of this process, the agency employed a government-standard procurement process, which enabled deliberate selection of best-in-industry technology to install in the new CSP. As a result, they made an early decision to invest in Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, which offered the benefits of application agility and data center automation. The move to an annual CSP service also involved use of new-to-the-agency Amazon Web Services (AWS) and virtual VMware hypervisor technologies.
The Solution
The agency’s rigorous review of available network and application performance management and service assurance technologies led them to select the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution. The real-time nGeniusONE information platform leverages NETSCOUT smart data as a universal data source for providing smarter analytics needed for end-to-end visibility throughout the agency’s virtualized and hybrid cloud environments. Deployed in the data center environment, InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) hardware appliances with NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology are transforming the agency’s wire traffic into smart data, enabling the IT team to ensure security, manage risk, and drive service performance for mission-critical applications. The agency addressed VMware platform monitoring needs by deploying the vSTREAM Embedded (vSTREAM-EMB) virtual appliance, which complements the ISNG platform’s visibility into north-south traffic by monitoring east-west traffic in the CSP data center’s virtualized environment. For remote office visibility, the agency has transitioned to a software-based approach for NetFlow, with the nGenius Collector Virtual Appliance and nGenius for Flows solution using ASI technology to seamlessly integrate NetFlow data with nGeniusONE smart data.
Operational Impact
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