Case Study: Medifast

Medifast trims downtime with Zenoss appliance

Overview:

Challenge: Implement a world class IT management solution that would ensure the health and performance of the company’s Windows centric environment. Medifast lacked internal domain expertise, therefore needed a solution that could be quickly and effortlessly deployed.

Solution: Medifast selected Zenoss Hardware Appliance with Enterprise subscription as its IT management solution with Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Availability and Performance Monitoring as well as Events Management capabilities.

Business Value:

• Zenoss Hardware Appliance helped to automatically discover and populate CMDB with 100% of IT environment including networks, servers, software, and applications, enabling Medifast to monitor previously unknown IT components.
• Zenoss Hardware Appliance helped lower unplanned downtime of www.medifast1.com. Medifast generates a large percentage of earnings from its internet application and one hour of downtime results in loss of $30K in earnings.
• Monitoring the health of Medifast’s ERP, MS SQL based applications and infrastructure allows the company to execute its strategy to grow from $80 million to a $150 million per year enterprise.
• Zenoss Hardware Appliance provides Medifast the capability to detect performance degradations with 3rd party solutions and enables the company to enforce service level agreements with partners.

Managing Growth:

Back in early 2006, the Medifast Executive Team realized that in order to achieve their goal of doubling company revenues, they needed a healthy and reliable IT system. A new CIO was hired and tasked to establish a scalable IT system.

"When I first joined Medifast, the company was working in a reactive mode to IT production failures" says John Hamilton, CIO of Medifast. Medifast had grown very successfully, but its IT department had failed to keep up with it."

The new CIO quickly took inventory and realized that Medifast used a predominantly Windows based environment. He also realized that he had to build an IT team from scratch and his team lacked domain expertise to deploy a sophisticated IT management solution.

Hamilton searched for an IT management solution that was Linux based, to avoid the vulnerabilities of Windows, and one that could be deployed effortlessly without relying on internal resources. He selected Zenoss Hardware Appliance with Enterprise subscription.

Immediate ROI:

Zenoss Hardware Appliance with Enterprise subscription was brought in and deployed within a few hours. Medifast was immediately able to automatically discover its IT networks and components, including a few that were not previously documented. Zenoss solution helped create a model based CMDB and enabled Medifast IT to deploy monitoring for business critical areas of the system. Flexibility of Linux based Zenoss Appliance provided full monitoring capabilities for Medifast’s heterogeneous IT environment and helped eliminate the need to deploy multiple tools.

Medifast realized the benefits of Zenoss Hardware Appliance within a few hours as performance degradations were proactively discovered and production failures averted. "The return on investment for Zenoss Hardware Appliance was 100% realized within 30 days of the deployment" says John Hamilton. "I was extremely happy to find a Linux based IT management solution that could work in a heterogeneous environment and not be susceptible to Windows’ security vulnerabilities."

Prior to deploying Zenoss Hardware Appliance, Medifast had experienced 2 major production failures that caused 12 hours downtime in total. Since Zenoss Hardware Appliance has been deployed, Medifast IT team has not experienced any production failures resulting in downtime.

Expanding Usage:

Zenoss Hardware Appliance with Enterprise subscription is used for configuration and automation of IT systems at Medifast, lowering the need for human intervention. Company is quickly adding new features to its web site, including user video testimonies. Zenoss Hardware Appliance is used to automatically restart servers as needed. This allows Medifast IT team to scale and become more productive as the company grows its operations. "Zenoss buys you time. You save the time it would take to get things up and running, and time equals money" says John Hamilton.

Zenosss Appliance Advantage for Medifast:

• Provides peace of mind
• Single IT monitoring and management solution for Medifast’s heterogeneous environment
• Ensures high availability and performance of e-commerce site
• Delivers single dashboard view of the entire IT environment
• Allows for historical benchmarking of performance metrics
• Discovers problems in end user experience and gives the ability to solve them before they become problematic
• Helps establish and enforce Service Level Agreements with 3rd party vendors

SysAdmin Alpana Nangpal’s Perspective:

"In a typical day, if there are any alerts, I receive an email from Zenoss on my PDA. Since Zenoss is web based, I can log in from anywhere to check the details of the alert, and take corrective actions as necessary. For example, if the alert is about a service outage, with the help of Zenoss, I can identify the source and restart it. Some days, I don’t receive any alerts from Zenoss. So when I come in to work, I look at the Events Console, my pre-configured charts, reports, performance of applications, and response times to look for pro-active measures I can take in order to avert future production problems. Zenoss Hardware Appliance helps me to proactively monitor, measure and manage our IT environment."

Medifast At A Glance

• Industry: Health and Diet Products
• Year Founded:1980
• Stock Exchange: NYSE (MED)
• Number of Employees: 300
• Revenues: $74.1 Million
• Customers: Over 1 Million
• HQ: Owings Mills, Maryland

www.medifast1.com

Medifast is a leader among easy-to- use, clinically proven portion controlled weight loss programs. Medifast has been recommended by 15,000 physicians and used by over one million customers. Medifast programs have been proven effective through studies by major teaching university hospitals. The company sells its products and programs via four unique distribution channels:

• The web and national call centers
• National network of physicians
• Medically supervised Medifast Weight Control Centers
• The Take Shape For Life direct-selling division

• Grow the top line revenues from $80 million to $150 million per year
• Increase availability and performance of Medifast’s e-commerce site
• Enable IT to help business meet its goals