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Hosting.com Success Story
Hosting.com and Zenoss: Monitoring Devices in a Fluid IT Landscape
The Challenge
Hosting.com, a 24/7 global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure services and facilities, is experiencing rapid growth across all of its data center sites. To better serve an expanding, sophisticated customer base, Hosting.com constantly innovates with new devices, networking and software, which allows it to offer uninterrupted, premium business-ready service.
As the customer base grows, ensuring their happiness with always-on IT solutions means that Hosting.com needs a monitoring solution that can scale quickly and accomodate daily and sometimes hourly changes in the device and network landscape, but that is also robust and stable enough to free up IT staff for other value-add activities. With over 15,000 devices needing constant monitoring, Hosting.com requires a complete monitoring solution that can scale and flex for rapid customization as their networks continue their rapid growth. Providing dedicated, managed, collocated and cloud hosting solutions places intensive demands on an IT department. Historically, Hosting.com added new IT assets to the networks multiple times daily. To track the operational performance of these devices, Hosting.com used a mix of two monitoring solutions. But even these two solutions combined could not scale to handle the growing network of over 15,000 devices. Hosting.com needed to find a solution that had the right features and the right flexibility at the right price - while bringing risk as close to zero as possible.
The goal of Hosting.com’s IT department was to move from a patchwork solution to a unified solution that would grow as quickly as the company was growing. Hosting.com’s Director of Network Engineering, Darrell Hyde, researched and compared the commonly available monitoring solutions, looking for a product combining the economy, features and flexibility needed to handle the company’s demanding environment. Legacy tools from the industry’s “Big Four” -- IBM, HP, BMC and CA -- required significant financial investments that did not fit with the company’s goals. Conversely, open source tools like Nagios were not capable of scaling with the company’s server-centric monitoring, and thus did not provide the functionality that Hosting.com needed.
The Solution
Hyde’s research pointed him to Zenoss and particularly, to the free Zenoss Core project, which offered the right balance of economy, functionality, scalability, and ease of use. Hosting.com’s IT department implemented Zenoss Core as the new server monitoring solution, taking advantage of the 75,000-person Zenoss community and making use of the broad library of ZenPacks to extend, modify, and customize Zenoss for their unique technical environment. The Zenoss API also provided Hosting.com with the ability to quickly write modifications and easily integrate them with the Zenoss product -- try that with a “Big Four” solution. With Zenoss came the flexiliby they previously lacked.
The Results
As soon as they implemented Zenoss, the IT team immediately began to see that Zenoss provided the ability to build IT monitoring and service assurance around their applications. Hosting.com’s legacy data -- hand-entered over the last 12 years -- added a slight complication to the migration; no migration is without its unique hiccups. However, Zenoss’ rich API allowed the company to import that data in seamlessly. The support of the Zenoss community and openness of the product enabled Hyde and his team to quickly deploy a solution that met each unique need.
“Having the API to provision and monitor resources is invaluable,” said Hyde. “For example, Zenoss gives us the ability to personalize the UI to fit our unique requirements.”
As Hosting.com evolved and expanded their use of Zenoss Core, it became clear that a commercial relationship with Zenoss would provide additional support capabilities as well as support for monitoring of their virtualized IT assets. So, after running Zenoss Core for approximately two years, Hosting.com upgraded to Zenoss Enterprise. The extra functionality, flexibility and support of the Enterprise product -- in particular, the ability to monitor virtualized and physical IT assets through a single interface -- were identified as must-haves for the future growth and success of Hosting.com. Their biggest concern during the transition was to ensure that their existing functionality was preserved. Thanks to a collaborative effort between Hosting.com, the Zenoss team and the community,the customization was preserved and the upgrade to Zenoss Enterprise is an ongoing success.
“We are driving a lot of new products around our ability to tie our customer portal into Zenoss,” added Hyde. “Our customer portal is one of the largest cross-team efforts internally, and feeding data into it is very, very important to our team and our customers -- that’s all powered by Zenoss.”
About Hosting.com
Hosting.com is a global provider of enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions, services and facilities. Hosting.com’s geographically dispersed data centers and Cloud Super Sites coupled with the industry’s top networking and connectivity technologies provide clients with the highest levels of security, reliability and support. The most recognized names in Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, Technology and Web 2.0 rely on Hosting.com’s colocation, cloud hosting, dedicated and managed hosting solutions.
Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified data centers in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO. All Hosting.com products and services are supported by 24x7x365 live expert technical support through toll-free telephone, email, and online chat. Hosting.com’s Entourage Support and Migration Managers set the industry standard in customer support, consultation, and responsiveness.
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