VCE Selects IDERA Over Quest for SQL Server Monitoring and Administration

Overview

VCE is a growing company formed by Cisco and EMC with investment from VMWare and Intel. They are the leaders in enabling companies to completely virtualize their data centers through their Vblock Systems. Vblock delivers optimized information technology systems that accelerate the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models. Bottom line says VCE Database Administrator Chris Shea, “If you want to virtualize your data center you come to us.”

Challenge

As the market leader, Chris and his team of SQL Server DBAs play a mission critical role for VCE and their customers around the world. “We support our three major applications that predominantly run on SQL Servers. Our role is ensuring that the databases stay up, are available, and that they are as tweaked for the best performance possible to allow for speed.”

A key part of Chris’ role is monitoring the overall health of his servers. However, this was taking up a large part of his day. “We have a number of monitoring systems inside of our environment, one of which monitors down-time so we can monitor databases by pinging them. But I was never able to view it without having to go to the database running my own queries, running my own profiles, etc. I had to spend probably two or three hours every morning remoting into each of my servers, running my query, and looking for bombs. And at that time, I didn’t have a history, so I didn’t know if anything happened overnight or spilled over. It was costing me several hours in a day and I knew I needed something that could automate it all,” said Shea.