City of Houston Success Story
City of Houston Trims Monitoring Costs with Zenoss
Tasked with managing the mission-critical network infrastructure at Houston Airport System (HAS), the world's sixth largest airport system, the City of Houston needed a fast and flexible way to manage a network consisting of over 250 Cisco routers, switches and firewalls spread across the city's three airports. City of Houston CTO, Matt Hyde, was faced with maintaining a large and complex network that was both costly to run and had constantly changing network demands.
The City of Houston's biggest challenge was to understand the bandwidth utilization between networks and to provision them accordingly. In the past, airport systems suffered from network congestion resulting from poor visibility into traffic usage, and the city's previous tool presented not only a large blind spot with regards to network usage, but also charged exorbitant licensing fees.
The Solution
Hyde enlisted the services of Pate Consulting to help him more efficiently meet the HAS demands while providing 500% cost reductions annually. Pate Consulting was able to quickly deploy Zenoss, and using Zenoss' network discovery capabilities, Pate automatically discovered all 250+ network devices and was monitoring them for availability and performance with little time and effort. Additionally, Zenoss gave the City of Houston a new level of insight into their network usage, allowing them to appropriately provision network bandwidth in order to accommodate the ever-changing needs of the airport system.
Pate Consulting owner Kevin Pate says, "I prefer to use commercial-grade open source solutions wherever I can because it allows me to quickly and economically solve my customers' problems. Zenoss has proved to be a best-of-breed-solution as it offers all the essential network management features but at a fraction of the cost."
The Results
Immediately upon installing Zenoss, Hyde could easily see the bottlenecks in his network and was able to take action to proactively improve the quality of network service. Not only did this give him a superior tool to manage their network but also provided huge cost savings.
Hyde says, "Zenoss gave us greater visibility and control over our network devices and reduced our current monitoring costs. Within sixty days, we were able to make the switch to [Zenoss] and pay for the cost of the new system with just two months of network monitoring savings. Total annual cost reductions are over 500%. Rarely do we ever get an ROI of that magnitude and we would not have achieved these savings without the help of Pate Consulting [implementing Zenoss]."
About Pate Consulting
Pate Consulting, is a leading Linux consultancy providing professional services located in Houston, TX that offers professional services for open source solutions including network design, database administration, and hardware/software support using products from Cisco, Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Oracle, The Apache Group, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and PHP. With over 14 years of Houston-based IT consulting experience, Pate Consulting specializes in providing solid open source business solutions that will not only improve your company's bottom line, but give you a competitive edge over your competition. For more information visit their website: http://www.pateconsulting.com/
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