BlueShore Financial explains why it chose CloudPhysics

From time to time, I like to speak with someone who is actually using a product rather than just listening to the supplier. This time, I communicated with Ryan C. Burgess, the Infrastructure Architect for BlueShore Financial, to discuss why his organization selected CloudPhysics to manage their data center operations. I really appreciate the time and effort Burgess put into explaining how his company made this IT decision.

Please introduce yourself and your organization

My name is Ryan C. Burgess and I'm the Infrastructure Architect for Blue Shore Financial. BlueShore Financial is a financial institution providing a full range of personal and business banking, wealth management, insurance and commercial lending solutions.

For more than 70 years, BlueShore Financial has helped clients achieve financial wellness through personalized solutions and expert advice – all delivered in a unique Financial Spa™ branch environment.

BlueShore Financial has 12 branches across the Lower Mainland and Sea-to-Sky Corridor in British Columbia, Canada. It administers $3 billion in assets and has been consistently ranked among the top 20 financial planning firms in Metro Vancouver.

What are you doing that needed technology of this type?

Management of a growing and ever more complex virtualized infrastructure. Analysis of current environment and planning for changes/growth.

What products did you consider before making a selection? Why did you select this product?

We looked at various different solutions but found that the CloudPhysics solution gave us the agility that we needed by utilizing the next-generation of analytics. Next-generation analytics, by the way, is my own term and I use it to describe technologies like Google Now and other context aware tools. It is my personal opinion that CloudPhysics seems to be modeling its solution after this type of thinking.

This type of thinking aligns with BlueShore Financial’s approach therefore the product was a good fit for us. Since this area of data analysis and customized graphical reporting is interesting to BlueShore Financial, we wanted to work with an organization that is directly involved on the leading edge of this. We are trying to apply this same logic to our own in house solutions and business challenges.

As a general practice, however, we do not speak externally about other parties who are part of an evaluation or bid process. We evaluated three platforms in total, including both traditional software solutions and SaaS solutions.

What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?

Two tangible benefits we have gained from the solution are:

• First, the lack of staff time required to handle the ‘care and feeding’ of the tool. Traditional tools require customers to patch, upgrade, and house the application. We don’t have and don’t want to assign resources to the maintenance of the tool, we need the tool to maintain itself and enhance itself. CloudPhysics is based on a SaaS model and therefore we are not responsible for these operational tasks.
• Second is our ability to gather information about wasted resources that historically has been difficult to obtain due to the size of our environment and drain on staff resources. We were able to recapture approximately 1TB of wasted snapshot space the first day we ran the tool which not only resulted in space reclamation but saving of cost.

We have a better handle on more intricate and hidden details within our VMWare infrastructure. The snapshots gone wild card is a great example. Its role is to provide analytics on the size and aging of snapshots created. It saves us space and assists in troubleshooting various issues that are not directly related to snapshot creation (backup software that creates snapshots but fails to remove them).

We take protecting our client data, business data, and regulatory responsibilities with uncompromising criticality and we generally do not entertain SaaS based solutions because of this. Since the tool is not capturing or interacting with our private client or business data, we were comfortable using a SaaS model.

What advice would you offer to others facing similar challenges?

CloudPhysics is really the next-generation of systems analytics. The collaboration between the user community and the CloudPhysics organization means that the product is constantly evolving and solution remains relevant to its customers.

Who is CloudPhysics?

CloudPhysics offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) Big Data analysis of IT operational data to help organizations improve how their IT infrastructure performs. Their goal is to "bring the power of Big Data analytics to every datacenter, capturing data about virtualized infrastructure, analyzing it, and providing unique insights that help IT teams make smarter data-driven operational decisions."

At this point, their cloud offering receives 100+ billion samples of configuration, performance, failure and event data from our global user base daily. They have amassed 20+ trillion data points of collective data that is used to help their customers by providing deep insight into their own IT operations.