| | Ineos Acrylics
WhatsUp Gold provides peace of mind to the world s largest acrylics producer
Ineos Acrylics is the world s largest and only global producer of Perspex and Lucite , with manufacturing and sales facilities in 25 sites across Europe, Asia, and America. Employing more than 2,000 people and supporting customers across more than 100 countries, Ineos naturally places a lot of weight on the reliability of its global IT network. All of the global sites are connected by a wide area network (WAN), facilitating knowledge, research sharing, and organizational processes.
Ineos acrylics are all around us: in baths, sinks, and showers, automotive components, medical equipment, optics, lighting, architectural products, and corporate imaging.
Ineos purchased five copies of Ipswitch s network monitoring tool, WhatsUp Gold, in November 1999 as part of its millennium precautions. We purchased WhatsUp Gold to assist with millennium testing which proved to be a big success, explained Graham Hotchkiss, global infrastructure manager of Ineos Acrylics. We had it linked to a Short Message Service (SMS) gateway via a Web-based e-mail package. When I got an SMS message on my mobile [phone] at 20 minutes past midnight on January 1, 2000, I was able to tell that our WAN, e-mail systems, and Internet interfaces were all up and running, not to mention the mobile phone network.
We planned a millennium conference call later that morning to report on the systems across the globe. I was able to look at WhatsUp Gold and see in detail that we had no problems anywhere on our network, said Hotchkiss.
Around the same time, the business was sold by ICI to the Ineos group. As part of that process Hotchkiss and his team had to build up a completely separate WAN infrastructure from the existing ICI corporate network. Using Ipswitch s WhatsUp Gold, they were able to plan and quality-assure all of the work done by outsourced network suppliers. We found that the work had not been completed properly at one site through WhatsUp Gold, which showed us what had been done incorrectly so that we could rectify what could have become an extremely disruptive problem, said Hotchkiss.
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 organizations that need immediate warning and notification 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 stress. WhatsUp Gold s advanced notification features can alert individuals or teams to network problems by e-mail, phone, fax, pager, and audible warnings notifying support staff of problems the minute they happen.
The Ineos group is continuing its expansion by buying up a number of other businesses that are being integrated into its WAN. Hotchkiss is using WhatsUp Gold to monitor this often delicate process. We regularly use WhatsUp Gold, which is based in three separate sites and monitors the global network, explained Hotchkiss. We access WhatsUp Gold using a browser and can therefore triangulate to find a network problem at a different location. This ability to access the information from a browser is a main reason why we decided to implement the software.
Since installing WhatsUp Gold in the various sites there have been numerous benefits, not least of which is my own peace of mind, enthused Hotchkiss. I am alerted to problems quickly and am able to diagnose them. Its great to know about them before the users start ringing in."
It is not simply when a problem is diagnosed that Hotchkiss has found WhatsUp Gold beneficial. His team routinely goes back and checks availability and response times for possible problematic trends. WhatsUp Gold has paid for itself many times over in helping us identify and resolve potentially catastrophic problems quickly, concluded Hotchkiss. Our network is growing due to the recent acquisitions and we will be using WhatsUp Gold to facilitate that.
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