July 06, 2009, 4:34 PM — This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.
The company
The Carphone Warehouse is the world's largest independent mobile phone retailer, as well as one of the UK's leading telephone and Internet service providers. Carphone Warehouse has more than 2,450 stores in nine EU countries and 1,000 Best Buy Mobile locations in the U.S.
The challenge
Knowing what's "under the hood" of our IT organization has been a particular challenge for us, exacerbated by our rapid growth and acquisition of Talk Talk (AOL UK). We were under pressure to achieve greater control and reduce costs within IT. "ERP for IT" was our vision for achieving that increased efficiency. Specifically:
- Post-acquisition, we had no definitive measure of our 1,400+ server estate and inter-dependencies
- We had no reliable, centralized database to support information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) initiatives
- Integrations with our configuration management database (CMDB) were slow (which translates to expensive)
The solution
We deployed Tideway Foundation™ across our four data centers, with the ultimate goal of providing a complete view of all our physical and virtual assets. The initial baseline provided us with a single system of record for configuration item (CI) inventory and dependencies, and delivered data directly to our CMDB which supports ITIL processes.
How it worked
Tideway provided an automated baseline of our global infrastructure, which allowed us to:
- Accurately measure our server estate and remove redundant servers. We identified 400 orphaned servers right away -- this discovery generated an immediate estimated $350,000 per month in cost savings
- Identify server-to-server dependencies and network configurations to manage change
- Automatically populate and maintain our CMDB data to support ITIL processes
- Streamline migration of multiple virtual servers
- Inform and improve negotiations with software vendors. With an accurate inventory of installed software, we were able to achieve significant savings when faced with a vendor-enforced audit
- Eliminate manual infrastructure audits, saving hours upon hours of labor
Three must ask questions
1. How quickly will I see a return on investment and what specific savings will I make? With Tideway, we discovered 400 orphaned servers immediately, leading to a cost savings that paid for the entire project's first year costs in a matter of weeks.
2. What is the best way to evaluate your product/solution? We defined our success criteria and looked at a total of four solutions, ultimately chosing Tideway based on speed of deployment and ability to bring us immediate results.
3. What else will this product/solution allow me to do? Tideway has become our trusted source of truth for application and infrastructure instances, providing a context for infrastructure data. It has also provided intelligence for a recent infrastructure outsourcing contract and underpinned a complex server migration project.
