Jordan’s Furniture deploys SIOS iQ for VMware to Improve Performance

August 17, 2016  by in Business Strategy, Industry   

The deployment provided sophisticated, machine learning derived analysis of the infrastructure recommending precise operational changes resulting in significant cost savings and improved application performance.

Jordan’s Furniture IT team uses SIOS iQ to help quickly and easily find and fix issues arising in their daily operations that had previously been too difficult to resolve using conventional monitoring tools.

Jordan’s Furniture is known for its innovation with each store offering a unique experience including IMAX 3D Theaters, Liquid Fireworks, and Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM) rides. Their IT department continuously improves its infrastructure to keep its business operations running efficiently and cost-effectively.

“Just knowing that our systems are operational is not enough,” said Ethan Peterson, Network Engineer, Jordan’s Furniture. “To ensure we can deliver excellent service to our customers, we need to ensure our IT operations are fast, reliable, and optimized for efficiency.”

The company’s VMware vSphere infrastructure runs a wide range of applications, including domain controllers, SQL Server databases, Exchange/Outlook, Web servers, and telecommunications applications.

“We wanted an easy-to-implement, cost-efficient solution that would allow us to be proactive – resolving issues before they become serious,” said Peterson. “We wanted one place to look to check the state of our operations, identify wasted VM resources, get solutions to performance issues, and predict our capacity utilization for accurate budgeting.”

They had previously used threshold-based monitoring and analytics tools but found that they inundated IT with alert storms and required complex dashboards without providing recommendations for resolving issues. These tools only monitor individual infrastructure “silos” – network, application, or storage – leaving IT to gather data from a variety of sources and manually determine the causes of problems and best steps to resolve them. While VMware vCenter Operations Management (vROps) would have provided a more comprehensive view of their environment, it was too complex for an organization their size.

Jordan’s Furniture implemented SIOS iQ machine learning analytics tool by downloading and installing the software into the VMware environment.

“We had SIOS iQ up and running in 15 minutes with minimal configuration and no impact to our operations,” said Peterson. Patented machine learning technology in SIOS iQ immediately "learned" the behavior patterns of interrelated objects in their environments and began analyzing normal versus anomalous behavior patterns. It automatically provided key insights and actionable recommendations for improvements.

“We immediately saw which areas had potential problems and how to solve them. Now it’s the first place we look to see how our VMware operations are running,” said Peterson. When Jordan’s Furniture encountered a hard-to-diagnose issue related to latencies on a critical datastore, SIOS iQ was the first place they checked.

With one click, the Jordan’s Furniture IT team was able to understand the issue and take action to maintain their target application service levels. SIOS iQ instantaneously provided a real-time analysis of the infrastructure that indicated six VMs were driving data store contention and made recommendations to reconfigure the environment to eliminate the latencies. 

SIOS iQ delivered significant value in helping Jordan’s save money and avoid unnecessary hardware purchases. Jordan’s was considering a purchase of either host-based caching, all-flash arrays, or hybrid storage to help with addressing application performance issues. However, SIOS iQ instantly determined the root cause of the performance issue and offered configuration changes resulting in higher performance gains without the need to purchase additional hardware. With SIOS iQ, Jordan's Furniture was able to improve performance without wasting time and money.

SIOS iQ also helped Jordan’s Furniture optimize storage resources by identifying and eliminating unnecessary waste. “It’s a good, quick way to make sure our operations are efficient and that we right-size our VMs for optimal performance,” said Peterson.

“SIOS iQ is designed to be the first stop for answers to VMware infrastructure questions,” said Jerry Melnick, President and CEO, SIOS Technology. “As an advanced machine learning–based analytics solution, it is highly automated and eliminates the manual configuration and rules definition required by conventional monitoring and analytics tools. Jordan’s is architecting a VM infrastructure that will help ensure the highest levels of service and responsiveness to customers while reducing IT costs. We are proud to have been selected a technology provider to a company of such distinction.”