Top Global Automaker Relies on NETSCOUT to Support Digital Transformation Initiatives

Customer Profile

The U.S. division of this global auto manufacturer sells cars, trucks, SUVs and light commercial vehicles worldwide under multiple brand names. In order to take advantage of today’s digital transformation, the company is consolidating data centers in a push to ensure its IT infrastructure can support the objective of building, selling, and servicing vehicles from anywhere in the world.

Business Challenge

To fulfill the CIO’s vision of being able to design, build, sell, and service the company’s vehicles from any place around in the globe, the IT team embarked on a data center consolidation effort with the goal of lowering risk and decreasing time-to-market with Cloud and application deployments. IT needed to deploy new application services faster, reducing the rollout of new services from four months down to one day.

Another major challenge was to assure performance of the design and build application services across a distributed infrastructure where all production facilities had to connect back to the data center. Failure to connect to the MPLS or WAN, and to the critical design and build applications, can stop the production line, disrupt the manufacturing cycle, and impact bottom-line revenue. Whenever the design applications were unavailable, the cost to the company was a half million dollars per hour. IT was under tremendous pressure to manage the implementation of a Cisco ACI-based software-defined data center, as well as put in place a single solution to monitor their plant and office automation tools. A further challenge was the need to monitor manufacturing plants without installing agents on the production network.

NETSCOUT Solution

To meet the digital transformation needs of the company, the architects and managers in the new data centers turned to NETSCOUT®. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, along with InfiniStream appliances and Packet Flow Switches allow the IT team responsible for the data center and infrastructure to identify, isolate and mitigate issues quickly.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The nGenius Packet Flow Switches were used to feed network traffic to InfiniStream appliances which provide comprehensive analysis across the enterprise environment. The nGeniusONE platform enables IT to manage the company’s remote plants from a central location. Passive, agent-less architecture gathers information from plants and feeds this back to the centralized management.

As the company retools additional manufacturing plants, the data center IT team is leveraging NETSCOUT solutions to monitor, analyze and resolve issues related to their MPLS and WAN connections between the data center and plants, as well as with their plant floor control systems, plant automation and office automation services. In one case, when their design application was unavailable, the nGeniusONE solution pinpointed the source of the problem to the back end database, not the design application itself. The quick service restoration minimized impact on the plant’s production line.

Business Value

For this top global auto manufacturer, the NETSCOUT solution has delivered tremendous benefits across the board. The nGeniusONE platform, InfiniStream appliances, and Packet Flow Switches proactively assure performance of design and build applications, mitigating downtime which could cost millions of dollars per day. Instead, IT is able to meet bandwidth requirements and enable critical engineering and manufacturing processes to proceed seamlessly.

NETSCOUT provides in-depth, agentless, service assurance in plant environments where agents are not an option, and monitors SDN performance in the newly consolidated data center, allowing faster service rollout. In addition, NETSCOUT has helped to streamline the war room by isolating issues and enabling the proper team to focus on and resolve them, thus speeding up mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).