Formed in 2000 to meet the needs of the intelligence and defense communities, NJVC provides innovative IT solutions that support the secure,automated enterprise, large and small.
With 15 years of inspired IT transformation and highly responsive customer service, NJVC is a global systems integrator spanning six continents. Their philosophy is simple, but impactful: Make IT work for your enterprise, rather than making your enterprise work for IT.
Marc Crawford is a Senior Systems Engineer responsible for NVJC's VMware estate, supporting 2500 employees.
With a streamlined IT team, Mr. Crawford needed a simple solution that could analyze and document performance improvements, plus improve the stability of NJVC's VMware vSphere environment, without having to expend time and effort to do so manually. While attending VMware's annual conference, VMworld, Mr. Crawford found a couple of solutions that he thought would fit the bill.
“I visited both Runecast and CloudPhysics at the show and both had good solutions,” commented Mr. Crawford. “However on further investigation,only Runecast Analyzer searches and compares the VMware Knowledge Base to deliver on our requirements.”
Runecast Analyzer is a patented proactive VMware vSphere management solution that installs as an OVA format virtual appliance. Runecast Analyzer uses current VMware Knowledge Base articles and our expertise to analyze the virtual infrastructure and expose potential issues and best practice violations, before they cause major outages.
Having obtained a free trial license during VMworld, Mr. Crawford embarked on a brief proof of concept before deploying across his three vCenters, two of which are version 6.0 and one is version 5.5.“Runecast Analyzer was very easy to deploy and manage. It is even easier to manage now that version 1.5 supports multiple vCenter environments,”said Mr. Crawford.
The solution has identified a number of critical issues for NJVC, such as driver/firmware incompatibility, patches that needed to be installed to remove vulnerabilities and bugs, and configuration changes to close security related issues.
Runecast Analyzer enables NJVC to remain secure and compliant, as well as ensuring NJVC's VMware environment is better optimized.
Prior to Runecast Analyzer, Mr. Crawford was not performing all the tasks required as they were just too time consuming. “Runecast Analyzer gives me peace of mind knowing that the servers are better optimized,configured, patched and secured, which mitigates downtime and saves a lot of man hours. The other business advantage is that we were not really analyzing and mitigating before, so we now have much less down time. Runecast Analyzer is helping us to go from reactive to proactive management,” concluded Mr. Crawford.
"Runecast Analyzer gives me peace of mind knowing that the servers are better optimized, configured,patched and secured, which mitigates downtime and saves a lot of man hours."
Marc Crawford
Senior System Engineer
NJVC
Run it... you will be amazed by the findings. We always think that a lot of applications are secure by nature and by how they’ve been designed, but after deploying Runecast you really understand the gaps that you might have in your environment and it’s definitely an eye-opener.
Vice President - Infrastructure & Security at Oman Airports
