Saar Gummi Czech s.r.o.: The Surveillance Centre Provides Clients with Continuous Operation of Information Systems

The European leader in the production of dynamic seals for cars. Approximately 850 employees.

The main reasons that led us to select the Surveillance Centre were to secure the operation of high availability applications by a limited number of technicians and to reduce downtimes to a minimum and prevent failures. Other benefits of the Surveillance Centre are that it helps deal with the organization of customer service interventions and ensures continuous operation. Jaroslav Falta, IT Department of Saar Gummi Czech s.r.o.

Task

With the production increase at Saar Gummi Czech, it was necessary to guarantee continuity while ensuring the reliability and constancy of supply to major automobile factories in this country and elsewhere in Europe. This led to the deployment of a warehouse management system and subsequently the Surveillance Centre, which was supplied by Infinity as an external partner. The main reasons that led to the selection of the Surveillance Centre were to secure the operation of high availability applications by a limited number of technicians and to reduce downtimes to a minimum and prevent failures.

Solutions

Infinity Surveillance Centre was established in 1998; since then it has been undergoing constant updates and development. It uses surveillance tools, shared directly by Infinity, but also third-party tools, such as those from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. It also uses the Nagios surveillance system.

The System Center Operations Manager from Microsoft and the Inside System Manager from Hewlett-Packard have been set up to provide customer support. These two systems are independent of each other but they can communicate with each other. The Inside System Manager from HP is primarily focused on monitoring hardware, servers, and server components. The Operations Manager from Microsoft is focused on the software layer of the system. This tool, which is also able to connect to third party customers, is used for the customer who needs to monitor details on its software, mostly large corporate applications such as e-mail and databases, but also the Active Directory, or just to monitor the amount of disk space.

Currently, there are several thousand entities, i.e. several thousand end user devices, surveilled in the Infinity Centre. In this respect, the Surveillance Centre provides services to both retail chains and manufacturing companies, as well as accountants and small businesses.

Specifically in the Saar Gummi Czech, hardware components and operating systems and applications are monitored on the servers for any critical elements; from among the other infrastructure, the surveilled elements include switches, access points in the places which are accessible with difficulties. Every monitored element or parameter has a defined escalation procedure which gives instructions for a customer service intervention.

“Our customers have defined some of their business processes that are critical to them and we monitor these processes in the lowest layers of the process, but we can also depict the overall map and the overall health of an individual process, and then the overall health of the entire infrastructure on the map,” explains Jan Gerhart, System Specialist at Infinity, a.s.

Achievements

The benefits of surveillance centres lie in overall cost savings for the operation of ICT. At the same time, the availability of system components and hence of the entire infrastructure of the company is significantly increased. In general terms, it is the proactive and reactive monitoring of key business applications and business systems.

In addition, the Infinity Surveillance Centre integrates the System Center Operations Manager and its own help desk, allowing customers to quickly and flexibly react to possible failures of servers and to secure the maximum availability of the whole ICT infrastructure.

Business Impacts

Operation of high availability applications secured by a limited number of technicians; downtimes prevented or reduced to a minimum. The Surveillance Centre also helps address the organization of customer service interventions and ensures continuous operation.