Bunker Hill Community College: Achieving High Availability with Heroix Longitude

Braintree, MA - June 24, 2008 - Heroix, a leading provider of agentless, multiplatform application performance and network monitoring software, today announced that Bunker Hill Community College is utilizing Heroix Longitude to cost effectively and proactively manage their organization’s IT performance monitoring and reporting requirements. Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) is a multi-campus urban institution with campuses situated in the historic Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts and another campus located in nearby Chelsea. BHCC enrolls more than 8,900 students in day, evening, weekend, web-based and distance learning courses and programs. The College offers more than 65 associate degree and certificate programs. Internationally recognized for development of individualized and alternative methods of instruction, BHCC is a leader in distance learning technologies that strengthen the learning environment.

Like many state colleges, BHCC is facing a tight economic situation with enrollment increasing every year while its budget is increasing at a lower rate. Expanding enrollment and programs increase the demand for IT services. However, securing funding for new equipment is challenging, therefore processors, random access memory, disk storage, network switches and other resources are often running near full capacity. “The monitoring software that we used in the past told us if a server was up or down but we were not alerted if an Exchange Store was not operating, we were nearly out of disk space, or if CPU usage was near the limit,” said Bret Moeller, Chief Information Officer for BHCC. “The result was that we didn’t know about problems until our critical systems failed. At this time, our availability levels were much lower than our present level of availability.”

“Several years ago we came to the conclusion that the limitations in our monitoring system were hindering our performance,” Moeller said. “We looked at a number of leading monitoring systems. We selected Heroix Longitude for several reasons. Longitude is more granular than the other systems that we assessed. It provides information on CPU utilization, memory, disk storage, networking capacity, Exchange Stores, etc. Longitude also has the flexibility to handle our complete mixed environment which includes mostly Microsoft, Solaris, Cisco networking equipment, network appliances, and a wide range of other miscellaneous devices. There are a few other systems that provide similar capabilities but they are all very expensive. Longitude, on the other hand, is priced at a level that fits our tight budget.”

From day one, Heroix Longitude demonstrated the ability to provide greater visibility into the BHCC environment and bring problems to the attention of IT staff before rather than after the fact. The monitoring system looks at all applications, services, and hardware. Whenever it finds a problem, it sends an email or a text message. The IT staff have pagers or cell phones to receive alerts. The system is configured to send an alert to Moeller and also to the person who is on call to handle problems. “For example if a server fails, I get a text message informing me that the device is down,” Moeller said. “I then call the Director who works for me and is responsible for that system and also call the on-call person to fix the problem.”

Besides providing alerts of problems, Heroix Longitude also maintains a database that is very useful for lifecycle planning and providing objective performance markers. “We provide a network performance report to the executives of the College that is visible to the President.” Moeller said. “It’s a very broad summary that shows any downtime that has occurred over the previous week.”

“Despite the challenges in maintaining the latest equipment, with the help of Heroix Longitude we have been able to maintain a very high level of availability,” Moeller concluded. “Nearly every week, the network availability report shows 100% uptime. Occasionally we have a problem such as a few weeks ago when a server was down for a short period before we could fix it. The bottom line is that over time our availability is running very close to 100 percent, a dramatic improvement over the levels that we saw before we started using Heroix Longitude.”

Heroix offers a 14-day free trial of Longitude as well as an online Flash demo. Longitude may be purchased online at www.heroix.com/store. Please consult the Longitude pricing page or call 800-229-6500 or 781-848-1701x231 for Longitude pricing.

About Heroix
Heroix delivers award-winning software products that help organizations optimize the availability and performance of applications, databases, systems, and IT infrastructure running across multiple platforms. Today, with a presence in over 40 countries, Heroix has delivered performance management solutions to over 1,000 organizations worldwide, including Arrowsight, Fallon Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Honeywell, Tembec, Motorola, Inc., and Young Broadcasting.