The Client: Ardagh Glass Group

The Business Need: A sustained period of growth through acquisition posed serious challenges for the IT department as it integrated new systems and new sites. A solution was needed to help monitor a fast-expanding environment and support the business in its growth strategy.

The Solution: Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager is a unifying IT management solution that gives Ardagh a holistic view of IT services, not just their constituent parts, to reduce downtime and improve performance.

The Benefits: For the first time, the Ardagh IT department can bring geographically dispersed infrastructure into sharp focus through a “single pane” view. With its in-depth reporting and analysis tools, it has become an integral part of the business and an enabler for future growth strategies.

The Business Need
Ardagh Glass is currently the third largest glass packaging manufacturer in Europe and expanding its global footprint as it explores new markets, most recently with the acquisition of Impress Coöperatieve U.A, increasing the number of Ardagh locations from 21 to just over 90 worldwide.

The challenge for Ardagh is managing and optimising an IT environment that grows with each acquisition. Before buying Impress, there was a requirement for a suite of system management tools that could monitor an infrastructure that incorporated 2,300 users, 2,000 computers and 300 servers.

Having overseen a significant body of work to integrate sites across Europe, John Hampson, Group IT Director at Ardagh Glass, wanted a solution that would help manage the IT operations. “The company runs a very complex environment that has grown significantly through acquisition over a number of years.  This has meant that getting a consolidated view of the overall infrastructure and IT estate has proven difficult to achieve in the past,” he said.

Ardagh is a Microsoft house that uses a full stack of its products, from the desktop to the data centre. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) was an obvious choice for monitoring the infrastructure. An early iteration of the product had been installed by another IT reseller but the deployment was not fit-for-purpose. The software had been configured incorrectly and there was no skills transfer, leaving the IT team ill-equipped to use it.

Headquartered in Ireland, Ardagh looked for a local IT services company that had the skill and expertise to deploy the solution effectively across Europe, while empowering the IT team with the skills to manage the system. Ergo was the natural choice.  
 
The Solution
Ergo is Ireland's only Microsoft Services Ready Partner for deploying System Center, the highest achievement that can only be attained through best-practice skills, intellectual capital and the ability to deploy solutions to the highest possible Microsoft standards.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), part of the System Center portfolio, is an end-to-end data centre service management tool that provides best-of-breed monitoring for Windows and other products, delivering increased efficiency and greater control.

Ardagh wanted the “single pane” view of the IT estate to monitor the Windows Server and SQL environments, messages sent to operators in response to alerts, the monitoring of network default gateways and the SharePoint infrastructure which is monitored and controlled by its IT environment.

Over a month, Ergo successfully deployed the solution. “It has to be installed correctly and carefully. Otherwise you risk causing more problems than you solve,” said Steve Blanche Network Services Operations Manager at Ergo.  “We used our skill and our experience as a Services Ready Partner to put intelligence into areas where there were no management packs or easy integration tools.”

SCOM is run out of the company’s two main data centres in Nienburg, Germany, where Ardagh had chosen to consolidate its infrastructure. Multiple comms rooms were closed down and applications retired as the IT department set about streamlining the infrastructure to a best-of-breed environment with SCOM used to manage and monitor it centrally. Training was ongoing throughout the deployment with Ergo using a combination of face-to-face and web-based instruction.

The implementation of SCOM went very smoothly.  It was getting to grips with the new approach to monitoring that proved more challenging to Ardagh. Ergo introduced the concept of looking at services holistically; the way the components work together rather than individual servers and devices.

“Ergo presented us with a very strong vision of how SCOM can be deployed and which services to monitor,” said John Hampson. “The concept of using SCOM to look at a set of IT services and monitoring those services, rather than getting down into the depths of individual servers, was particularly appealing to us.”

The Benefits
With Microsoft System Center Operations Manager properly implemented, and the skills to run it successfully transferred to the Ardagh IT team, the company now has a monitoring solution that delivers tangible benefits to the business. As well as facilitating problem solving and increased system uptime, the company enjoys a better understanding of IT service delivery. 

“It’s the first time we have had the capability to drill down and get straight to problems and understand what effect those problems are having on the business,” said Hampson.

Availability reports on core services and trend analysis information inform the business, for example, on where it might need to invest in additional servers for better performance, storage for more capacity, or bandwidth to alleviate network bottlenecks.

“It’s all about ease of management, better reporting and more visibility,” said Blanche. “For a company with a sprawling infrastructure that made it hard for management to get a view on what was going on, these are massive gains. SCOM ties everything together with an overview of the entire estate.”

SCOM is scalable and can smooth the pass of integration with other IT systems as Ardagh acquires other businesses. “It will be a fundamental part of our integration strategy going forward,” said Hampson. “SCOM has become our main operational monitoring platform and an integral part of our business. We have gone from having a system that was of no benefit to us and costing us money to run, to having a valuable and integral part of our infrastructure.”   

Click here to find out more about System Center Operations Manager.