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FFVA Mutual Leverages Akorri BalancePoint for Proactive Management of Capacity in Virtualization Data Center

BalancePoint Acts as Communications Hub Across IT Disciplines to Manage and Optimize All Server, Storage and Database Resources

Akorri announced that FFVA Mutual Insurance Company has begun using Akorri's BalancePoint software for proactively managing its virtualized data center infrastructure. FFVA Mutual Insurance is leveraging BalancePoint as a communications hub across IT disciplines for monitoring, analyzing and optimizing all resources within its data center to ensure their performance meets application needs.

"We had niche tools for managing particular elements within our infrastructure, but BalancePoint has provided us with critically-needed communication across all devices and IT domains, making it exponentially easier to find the root cause of performance issues, spot potential bottlenecks before they effect performance, and understand how much capacity is being utilized within server, storage and database resources," said Jim Calhoun, MIS Manager at FFVA Mutual Insurance Company.

"The complexity of our data center has grown as we've virtualized nearly all our servers, so we have been extremely pleased with what BalancePoint has done to simplify its management," continued Calhoun. "What used to take us weeks now takes hours or even minutes to decipher. Not only have we been able to proactively ward off poor performance, but also understand how much storage, memory and CPU is being used so we don't overspend on adding more. For example, BalancePoint keeps track of how many virtual servers we can add to our physical servers before performance is affected. No other tool provides this level of analysis."

After the first few days of installing Akorri's BalancePoint, FFVA was able to resolve a mysterious, intermittent, system wide performance hit that would occur at the same time each day. FFVA was able to correct the problem, a storage resource contention issue, and it hasn't returned.

"We are delighted to help FFVA Mutual Insurance Company simplify the management of its virtualized data center," said Tom Joyce, CEO of Akorri. "FFVA is similar to many companies who have embraced virtualization -- with its implementation they now need to a way to bring together detailed monitoring and analysis information across the entire physical and virtualized infrastructure to more easily spot potential performance pain points and plan for future capacity."

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