Parity

Company: Ipswitch Inc.Customer: ParitySubmitted by: MCC InternationalDate: August 2000Parity Solutions’ mission statement is to improve the performance of its clients’ businesses through the delivery of leading-edge technology expertise. With a heritage in offering specialist teams that deliver the full lifecycle of professional services – including IT consultancy, systems development, support and application management and training – Parity Solutions provides the very best in tailored IT solutions to its clients.As you’d expect from a company that specialises in getting the most out of technology, Parity Solutions relies on its IT infrastructure.

With offices in Ireland, Holland, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland – as well as 10 sites in the UK – Parity Solutions’ 600 staff, work and communicate across a series of Wide Area Networks running Unix and NT powered servers. To ensure the smooth running of the networks and to offer a heads-up to potential problems, Parity Solutions run WhatsUp Gold by Ipswitch, the network mapping, monitoring and notification software package that allows network administrators to quickly and easily track outages and key performance statistics, helping to significantly reduce network downtime.”We’ve been using WhatsUp Gold for four years,” explained Peter Milne, systems manager for Parity Solutions, “As the number of sites increased we recognised a need for continual monitoring of the networks. We also needed a fast and efficient method of alerting the IT teams to any problems – WhatsUp Gold has fitted the bill perfectly.”Known for the speed of its notifications when a critical device or service goes down, WhatsUp Gold is highly regarded as a cost-effective, stand-alone monitoring system – particularly among ISPs and other small to medium-sized organisations – that need immediate warning and notification of when a mission-critical device, such as a server or router, fails.

WhatsUp Gold is also the ideal accompaniment to larger enterprise system management platforms from vendors such as Hewlett Packard, Tivoli Systems, Cisco and Computer Associates.The easy-to-install and configure software also allows administrators to distribute monitoring responsibility among their systems team with little or no training, reducing administrative costs and stresses. And with its advanced notification features – WhatsUp Gold can alert individuals or teams to network problems by e-mail, phone, fax, pager and audible warnings – support staff can be notified of problems the minute they happen.”WhatsUp Gold is displayed on a monitor visible to the entire Parity Solutions IT support team, showing a summary map of all the sites across Europe. The individual site details can be checked on more detailed maps,” explained Peter.

“One of the most useful features in WhatsUp Gold is the ability to log by e-mail all significant network incidents. Parity Solutions now has a better understanding of what’s happening across its networks and as a result offers a better service to its users, which in terms means a better service to customers.”In the near future, Peter anticipates a need to be able to monitor the throughput of traffic across the WAN lines. WhatsUp Gold’s compatibility with larger systems management products already allows for the networking monitoring capabilities to be integrated into traffic management and network utilisation programmes, but its strength lies in the fact that it is a cost effective, dedicated software package that helps companies react to and even avoid costly downtime.”There was no standardised method of monitoring the health of our networks before we implemented WhatsUp Gold, so the benefits to our IT infrastructure in terms of having better access to network information have been significant,” concluded Peter.

“Every member of Parity Solutions shares the responsibility for delivering high quality services to our customers, and for the IT teams that means ensuring that our colleagues are backed up by reliable IT resources and WhatsUp Gold is a valuable tool in helping us to reach and maintain, that goal.”