In the past, that unpredictability, coupled with a hodgepodge of aging switches, routers, and firewalls, often spelled trouble for Rudolph and Sletten's network. Down nearly 20 percent of the time, it played havoc with productivity, says Sam Lamonica, the Rudolph and Sletten executive who manages the company's information services.
"When we have connectivity problems at a job site, we literally lose the lifeline to our infrastructure," says Lamonica. A network outage leaves onsite project planners, supervisors, and engineers without access to Prolog Construction Manager, the business-critical application the company uses to manage virtually every aspect of its construction projects.
To gain control of their balky network environment, Lamonica and his staff of 14 turned to an open-source alternative to the major systems management solutions in the market. Since deploying GroundWork's GroundWork Monitor, Rudolph and Sletten's distributed network uptime has jumped to 99.8 percent, according to Lamonica. That means monthly downtime has gone down from nearly a week to about 12 minutes.
Moreover, the new monitoring system has helped increase the company's leverage with suppliers, which can no longer point the finger when their products or services fail. It has also enhanced Rudolph and Sletten's ability to pinpoint problems before failures occur, as well as allowed the company to deploy extensive wireless capabilities at its job sites--all at a fraction of what a similar system from HP or BMC Software would cost.
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