JN Data Expands Business and Moves Ahead Confidently with Vityl Capacity Management

Keeping Services Up and Running Without Interruption

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Jyske Bank, the third largest bank in Denmark, and Nykredit, the largest mortgage company in Denmark, founded JN Data, a cost-sharing data center, in 2002. JN Data serves as the IT operation center for both Jyske Bank and Nykredit, and they have expanded their services to external clients.

Business Value of Vityl Capacity Management

Vityl Capacity Management (Vityl CM) helps JN Data keep services running without interruption by identifying systems or services that need attention. Before the solution was implemented, reports were pulled manually from tens of thousands of servers into hundreds of reports.

Now Vityl CM automates performance and capacity reporting, so JN Data and their clients can understand their capacity and make informed business decisions. Additionally, as JN Data grows, they can predict future capacity needs and right-size workloads. 

Challenges and Goals

Having diverse server platforms and applications makes it hard to predict what will happen in the IT environment. Before implementing Vityl CM, JN Data manually produced more than 100 customized reports each week from tens of thousands of servers. This enormous volume of data made it difficult to identify and communicate capacity needs and dangers.

The team had a hard time improving visibility into their IT environment. “When we did capacity planning activities, we didn’t know if we had problems with a production server, or which application it was related to,” said JN Data’s Capacity Manager Henrik Tonnisen. “We would just wait for problems to pop up and react to the situation.” Many times, customers would alert the team to problems.

More than 70% of IT managers across the globe said their organization operates in a reactive or chaotic state, according to a recent survey. When reacting instead of planning ahead, IT teams fall victim to whatever issues may be hidden in their systems.

Ultimately, as one of the largest IT operations centers in Denmark, JN Data wanted to continuously optimize their operation through proactive, automated actions. The banks and other financial institutions they work with demand top response times for their customers. JN Data couldn’t afford the lack of visibility and analysis into their IT environment at the time of implementation—and even less so now.

Today, JN Data works with customers and partners to connect technical data and business data, allowing them to examine specific time periods or situations and improve business decisions.

We’re able to measure and have visibility into the business areas with lots of services attached, identify the relationship they have to each other, and understand the size of the system. In the end, IT and our customers see how much memory and CPU cost are used for a specific, primary business.

Henrik Tonnisen, Capacity Manager, JN Data

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Understanding the Data and Defining IT’s Business Value

Implementing Vityl CM meant JN Data’s IT team could understand the connections between applications and servers, an imperative in an environment that supports Linux, AIX, and Windows along with WebSphere, DB2, and others.

“We merge the technical data from 10,000 servers with business data from our CMDB to create the reports our customers want,” Tonnisen said. “We’re able to measure and have visibility into the business areas with lots of services attached, identify the relationship they have to each other, and understand the size of the system. In the end, IT and our customers see how much memory and CPU cost are used for a specific, primary business.”

Tonnisen says it’s easy to navigate through their IT systems and share relevant information with customers now that they’ve incorporated self-service reporting. Using a Java program, they created an interface that controls access to specific reports and visibility into different levels of server data. JN Data credits help from TeamQuest in making this happen. “TeamQuest grasped onto our ideas and helped us deliver this capability to our customers.”

Zooming in on Problem Situations

Tonnisen said his team received a standing ovation from stakeholders after announcing the new self-service reporting dashboard. “Our customers submit their ‘order’ and they receive a detailed report tailored to their specific need,” he said. For example, one report reveals 10 different metrics based on looking at a server from vCenter. It shows CPU, memory, I/O, disc, network traffic, and usage. Viewers can also see how their virtual environment shares CPU and memory across the interface of the hosts.

The Total Performance Indicator (TPI) enables us to zero in on potential problems and understand if a server has enough capacity to serve the application.

Henrik Tonnisen, Capacity Manager, JN Data

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With so many servers, prior to implementing Vityl CM, JN Data had a hard time narrowing the field to just those that were having issues. Now they can focus on the 100 underperforming servers instead of 10,000. “The Total Performance Indicator (TPI) enables us to zero in on potential problems and understand if a server has enough capacity to serve the application. We’re able to be more proactive since we can see the specific servers that have a lot of wait time, for example,” Tonnisen explained. The TPI provides a system health overview with the ability to drill down to each server related to that system. With this level of visibility, IT can keep a lot of issues at bay.

According to a global survey, IT managers say they deal with 8 unexpected IT issues each week, on average, with each unexpected issue taking more than 3 hours and using 7 seven staff members to resolve. Fortunately, JN Data has improved its ability to uncover potential dangers, requiring fewer staff members and being able to allocate resources proactively. This visibility has helped IT prove its value. Tonnisen says, “Being able to narrow our focus on the 100 servers that matter in real time —instead of wading through 10,000—and being able to provide relevant reports to our customers is what gives IT value to the business."

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