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A commercial organisation with revenues of over € 2.6 billion in 2010, Austrian Lotteries also raises funds for sports and charities in a similar way to other lotteries in Europe, and has nearly 500 employees. Players can register to play a range of online games including Lotto, Toto (a pooled football game), instant games and Bingo. To enable this broad range of offerings, the organisation runs a network of terminals to cater to customers located across Austria and manages over 150 terabytes of data. In order to maintain the outstanding level of service its customers have come to expect, Austrian Lotteries treats data security, system reliability, response time, and business continuity as top priorities.

To support this organisation, its IT department runs two datacentres, both based near Vienna. Within these datacentres are several HP storage systems and approximately 600 Brocade switch ports. As all IT transactions are processed through both datacentres, a reliable storage infrastructure which ensures uninterrupted flow of all IT operations is key.

Following a detailed evaluation of several options, Austrian Lotteries’ team selected a Virtual Instruments solution comprising VirtualWisdom software and SANInsight monitoring hardware. This has given the customer a level of visibility into its SAN that it had never experienced before, one that has brought significant benefits to the organisation. VirtualWisdom checks each data packet going through the Fibre-Channel SAN enabling the IT administrators to analyse the storage I/O with unprecedented, real-time granularity. It was important to be able to detect any application performance degradation before affecting users and this hardware/software combination quickly and easily identifies failures of connected devices. VirtualWisdom also spots overloaded ports or non-authorised traffic and monitors storage I/O data from the server to the storage volume to deliver detailed end-to-end analysis.

VirtualWisdom monitors switch performance in real-time, allowing the IT team to set individual thresholds and alerts and to get overall comprehensive view of the health of their SAN fabric. Unlike competing alternatives, the Virtual Instruments solution checks all switches in the SAN, irrespective of vendor; once a highly utilised or underutilised port is detected, the administrator is able to balance the load very quickly, avoiding performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, VirtualWisdom detects failed multi-pathing links and identifies sub-optimised links. With VirtualWisdom, IT administrators can analyze historical performance trending, properly plan SAN capacity planning, and design optimal backup scenarios.