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Customer Success Stories

SonicWALL: Restoring the Strategic Focus of IT

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Experience Highlights
  • Challenge: To keep a strategic focus while handling disruptive issues that arise in fast-changing and complex environments.
  • Solution: Use Zenprise to solve e-mail and infrastructure problems against a backdrop of constant change and complexity.
  • Interesting That: Even companies whose business is IT infrastructure face challenges administering complex Exchange environments.

Strategic thinking is the holy grail of IT and it shouldn’t happen only during vacations. For many companies, rapidly changing and complex environments can turn most work days into firefights. SonicWALL’s IT staff faces these difficulties and more. As a leading supplier of security appliances with integrated threat protection, SonicWALL operates a production network that serves both as a place for employees to do their day-to-day work and as a proving ground for SonicWALL's latest products.

Larry LaBas, Director of IT Operations for SonicWALL, doesn't waste his time trying to change what is. He accepts that SonicWALL's need to test its new products on its own employees before releasing them to customers means his IT team will constantly face new challenges. One of his biggest challenges is ensuring that the company’s e-mail system, critical to just about everyone in the company, works seamlessly through these changes. By using Zenprise, LaBas has found a way to help ensure e-mail flows smoothly and that he has time during the work week to plan for the future.

E-mail Must Work to Maintain Sanity

While SonicWALL has 350 employees and 400 e-mail accounts in total, the numbers don’t even begin to describe the complexity of the company's systems. Those 350 people work from locations across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and many of them rely on remote access to do their work. SonicWALL's relatively complex e-mail infrastructure includes three Exchange 2003 and six legacy Exchange 2000 servers, along with 12 domain controllers.

To complicate matters, SonicWALL is usually in the midst of some type of migration. When we spoke with LaBas, his team was just completing both a migration from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 and a consolidation of e-mail accounts onto fewer Exchange servers. His staff must perform these upgrades and migrations while keeping more than 2 million e-mails per month flowing through the company.

Infrastructure changes, migrations, upgrades, and new installs are part of the routine at SonicWALL. Yet LaBas and his group enjoy peace of mind knowing that during these changes, Zenprise will help diagnose any problems or anomalies that arise. As LaBas puts it, “Zenprise brings the rapidly changing environment into clear focus.”

Zenprise Increases Credibility

During an earlier migration, SonicWALL had been plagued with a peculiar problem: Creating a new employee account in Active Directory would not create a corresponding mailbox in Exchange. New employees' productivity would be hindered because they had to wait as much as a week before they could use e-mail normally. The only workaround SonicWALL had found required restarting the Exchange service, an undesirable solution that affected other users. LaBas and his team discovered that Zenprise immediately uncovered and provided resolution steps for this hard-to-find configuration issue.

Zenprise Handles the Hard Stuff

Most companies struggle to manage the complex infrastructure of a typical Exchange environment. Isolating and resolving problems is difficult because e-mail relies not just on Exchange servers, but on a variety of complex interactions between Active Directory, DNS, network components, and e-mail client software such as Microsoft Outlook. According to LaBas, “Zenprise understands the entire Exchange environment, not just the Exchange server itself.”

Zenprise can often identify a root cause of an “e-mail” problem that has nothing to do with Exchange itself, but instead results from configuration issues on other subsystems such as Active Directory and DNS. It takes a product like Zenprise to sift through all of the information available in the environment, analyze the data, diagnose the problem, and suggest a resolution.

“During one of our domain migrations, our London office lost e-mail contact with our Sunnyvale headquarters,” LaBas says. Although he suspected an Active Directory configuration issue, it was Zenprise that specifically identified the problem and outlined simple problem resolution steps. At the same time, Zenprise uncovered some previously undetected problems that were slowing down user logins and address book lookups. “Every time we have followed the resolution flow charts provided by Zenprise to solve a problem, it has worked,” says LaBas.

Restoring IT's Strategic Focus

How did SonicWALL cope before it installed Zenprise? “When we had an Exchange problem in the past, we attempted to collect all the relevant information manually from servers and then have our staff or technical support personnel analyze the data,” says LaBas. “It’s time-consuming to sort through all of the details and relay the appropriate information to the right people. It’s especially painful when all the time invested doesn’t resolve the problem.”

LaBas described that his perfect day at SonicWALL would be helping business units plan out new strategic initiatives. With Zenprise's ability to prevent the constant firefighting, it’s clear why Zenprise works for him.