ManageNow enables a wholistic data center monitoring at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute

"Fujitsu ManageNow® impressed us as soon as we started testing. This solution provides a much clearer and easier approach to managing our state-of-the-art, heterogeneous infrastructure."

Bernhard Rabe, Operating Systems and Middleware Group, Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik GmbH

The customer

The Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik GmbH (HPI) at Potsdam University is the only university institution in Germany to offer bachelor and masters programs in “IT Systems Engineering”. This IT course, which places a strong focus on practical experience and engineering, is currently attended by 480 students. The institute employs a total of eleven professors, and hosts over 70 further guest professors, lecturers, and associate lecturers. At HPI, the research and education programs focus on the underlying principles and applications for large, highly complex, and networked IT systems. The institute is largely financed by Founding Professor Hasso Plattner, Joint Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board at the software company SAP.

The Future SOC (Service-Oriented Computing) Lab is a collaborative initiative between the Hasso Plattner Institute and its industrial partners EMC, FUJITSU, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and SAP. The Lab provides interested scientists and academics with a state-of-the-art hardware and software infrastructure for research purposes free of charge. This includes technologies that are not yet available on the market and that traditional universities would struggle to finance, such as servers with up to 64 cores and 2 TB main memory. Such offerings are intended particularly for researchers in the fields of information technology and business informatics. Focus areas include cloud computing, parallelization, and in-memory technologies.

The challenge

Replacement of the existing in-house monitoring solution for the highly advanced data center infrastructure of HPI Future SOC Labs, which had been developed on the basis of an open source system – with the aim of significantly reducing the amount of monitoring and administration required.

The solution

Implementation of the pre-configured software solution Fujitsu ManageNow® for Data Center Monitoring. Based on the Nagios and Icinga open source systems, this solution supports the integration of existing Icinga scripts.

The benefit

Convenient management solution with a large number of “out-of-the-box” management functions
Reduction in customizing effort through ready-made solutions
Well-structured web interface provides a quick overview of the systems being monitored, including existing dependencies
Visualization of the impact of infrastructure problems on the services affected
Flexible grouping of services and resources, with corresponding definition of responsibilities and notifications
Continued use of Icinga plug-ins developed in-house
Reduced time and personnel effort for IT monitoring and reporting