Case Study: Pando

Zenoss Helps Pando Avoid Pandemonium

Overview

Challenges: Cost management and scalability are the main challenges for Pando Networks. With hundreds of servers, many diverse applications, and rapid growth, it was imperative that they found an IT management solution that could monitor availability and performance while providing scalability to grow with the company.

Solution: Pando selected Zenoss as its IT management solution with Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Availability and Performance Monitoring as well as Network and Events Management capabilities.

Business Value:

• Zenoss enabled Pando IT to establish service level agreements with its business organization to support the company's aggressive growth objectives.
• Using Zenoss helped Pando IT become proactive and detect performance issues worldwide before they impacted users.
• Linux based Zenoss provided an affordable IT management solution for Pando's heterogeneous IT environment, eliminating the need to deploy multiple solutions.
• Zenoss provided a painless deployment and was easy to extend through customization helping to meet Pando's unique requirements.

Managing Growth

Pando Networks operates the world's largest and most advanced managed P2P network with more than 15 million users. With the goal of accelerating the performance and reducing the cost of delivering high quality media, Pando delivers more data daily than any P2P network of its kind.

With a growth rate of 1.5 Million new users per month, Pando IT has been challenged to manage their rapid growth both from a hardware and a software perspective. They quickly outgrew the open source IT monitoring solution they initially installed, and were looking for a more reliable, scalable and affordable option.

Pando CTO Laird Popkin, realized that Pando needed a complete IT management solution that would monitor not just servers, operating systems, but all the applications, services, and processes within Pando's infrastructure. The new solution also needed to offer advanced features such as Configuration Management Database and automatic discovery of IT components.

"Cost management and scalability are my main challenges," said Popkin, "We had outgrown the standard open source solutions for alerting and monitoring that really don't scale to large, geographically distributed farms with hundreds of servers."

Reliable, Scalable, and Affordable

Pando uses internal IT resources coupled with open source solutions to effectively and affordably manage IT systems. With its rapid growth, management prefers to use budget resources to acquire new hardware rather than expensive software from large vendors.

"We were using other open source solutions that we had outgrown. As a result we started to look at commercial alternatives. We have actually looked at CA Unicenter. It was very expensive and it required a very expensive and long professional services engagement.

After some initial research, we selected Zenoss, which was open source based and did not require a long professional services engagement to deploy and maintain. We received initial help from Zenoss professional services and they were excellent. Since then, it has been very easy for us to maintain and even customize Zenoss to fit our IT needs."

Zenoss Benefits for Pando

• Open source means customizable
• Easy to deploy, use and maintain
• Affordable, scalable and reliable
• Complete IT Management solution
• Does not require long-term professional services engagement
• Enabled Pando to become proactive in their monitoring

From a SysAdmin's Perspective

"Zenoss works the way we work."
- Systems Administrator Greg Davis

"We use Zenoss for all of our monitoring needs. It helps us with inventory, performance monitoring, system status and general health of our systems. Currently, we are monitoring over 200 servers in production, numerous services, processes, and up/down status on all of our systems including infrastructure components such as routers. We use our own hardware to host Zenoss and we initially asked Zenoss Professional Services to help us with the setup. They helped us fast track the deployment and they were fantastic.

When we receive alerts, we typically acknowledge the alerts so that our team members know who is working to solve the issues. Using Zenoss we search the root causes of performance problems and once the issues are resolved we send an email to the rest of the team.

Zenoss has been very valuable in helping us understand the metrics that we capture
from our servers and applications. For example, we perform proactive tests against our systems and capture information in order to detect performance issues before they result in production failures. I would highly recommend Zenoss to companies of all sizes. It has been very easy to use and maintain. Its design and layout really makes sense. It works the way we work."

At A Glance

• Industry: Content Delivery Network
• Year Founded: 2006
• Number of Users: Over 15 Million
• Delivers Over 130 TB of Data/Day
• HQ: New York, NY

Pando Networks is a leading provider of managed peer-to-peer (P2P) media distribution services that enable content owners to securely and cost effectively distribute high-resolution media. Pando Networks enables content owners to deliver media with P2P efficiency and CDN reliability. Pando Networks is a private company funded by Intel Capital, BRM Capital and Wheatley Partners.

• Pando's Key Initiatives:
  • Spend money on servers and bandwidth for our users, not on licensing expensive software
    
• Previous IT Solutions used:
  • Nagios
  • Computer Associates