Sector: Paper processing industry

Summary: Sappi uses i-doit for the capacity planning of over 5000 items. As one of the first open source users, the company has implemented i-doit with thegoal of bundling data generated from free or open ITSM tools to create a consistent overview of the company’s IT happenings.

The Company:

Sappi is a globally operating vendor of paper and cellulose products. The Sappi Group has approximately 15,600 employees throughout the world and produces 6.6 million tonnes of paper, 3.3 million tonnes of cellulose and 800,000 tonnes of chemical fibres annually. These products are then sold to customers in over 100 countries. Throughout Europe, Sappi Fine Paper Europe runs nine production locations in Germany, Austria,Switzerland, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands. The central IT department is based in Maastricht, Netherlands; as well as in Gratkorn, Austria.

The Challenge:

Open source solutions and internal development are standard practice at Sappi. Over time, a number ofproducts amassed, which all had to be coordinated at some point. An integrating solution was sought as a common denominator. The company has already been using open source tools for more than ten years. This includes; according to Gerald Platzer, infrastructure manager for Europe with Sappi Papier Holding GmbH, Gratkorn; the entire range of GNU tools and the Samba programme package. Also included are the MCP monitoring framework, which was developed internally, and last but not least, the mediawiki for comprehensive knowledge management in the IT and other departments. Sappi uses Samba Tools for file sharing in a 24-hour production system in the EU and USA; the GNU tools are mostly used as command line tools. The CVS (concurrent versioning system) is used for configuration management and source code management, as well as for programme developmentwithin the company.

Approach and Timeframe:

Platzer sees the use of free software as pure pragmatism: “Open source always shines when it fits and when a free solution is faster and more attractive than a completely commercial system. Our aim is a sensible mix that benefits our company.”
i-doit has been active at Sappi for eight months. Using this tool, the IT department currently documents approximately 3400 items. For this, servers and network devices such as switches or routers, but also air conditioners and a non-stop power supply all fit into the tool’s configuration management database (CMDB). According to Platzer, by the end of the year, “we will be managing up to 5000 items with i-doit. The areas of use are capacity planning, especially rack space management, and scaling the air conditioners and USV systems.” What is important to Sappi is that i-doit allows for region imaging, with which the user can move into the building and the individual rooms. This is not possible with free-competition products and was also not possible with existing commercial solutions. Another of i-doit’s benefits is that physical and logical items can be separated, as well as grouped (stacked switches, server clusters).
Other free tools for ITSM that are used by Sappi are Nagios, which monitors networks and storage components, NeDi for network management, Cacti for performance monitoring and Ntop for network capacity utilization. To transform the data provided by these individual systems into an overall view, Sappi is working with i-doit provider synetics. The projectedgoal is a consistent state of information, from which, depending on necessity (and independent of propriety systems’ functions), individual analysis or management functions can be recorded. Platzer states: “We are working towards such an alignment and i-doit is set to play the central role in that. Amongother things, our design allows for configurations that have been discovered by NeDi to be compared with existing documentation with i-doit. That means that we have an up-to-date comparison of the actual and target situation and can take action against unwanted deviations.”  

The Benefit:

This type of manageable and individually applicable database creates a solid foundation regarding the topic of disaster recovery, because employees are informed about the infrastructure, including its configuration. Michael Brandstätter, infrastructure engineer, praises the tool: “We receive audit information at the touch of a button and can run our capacity management without conducting an individual inventory.” He doesn’t withhold his criticism, however: “There is still room for improvement when it comes to usability. We need too many clicks to get to the data; that could be programmed leaner and smarter. Apart from permissions management, we would like to see a function for mass updates. We currently have to initiate this inconveniently through ourdatabase, using stored procedures.” The top bug alerter Brandstätter also never misses a mistake that appears in the synetics quality processes during updates. But this can also appear with open source products, say the Sappi experts, Brandstätter and Platzer: “We are using the product at nearly 100 percent capacity; we like to push each solution to its limits – and we expect our providers to keep up. Synetics understands this and is keeping up nicely.”

Published in July 2011

Author: Konrad Buck

Background: The ITIL®-compliant open source solution for IT documentation, i-doit, has been on the market since late 2004. In the meantime the product has established itself in many companies. Since 2009 synetics positions i doit as base product for "Smart ITSM". For this purpose there are interfaces solutions in the areas of network monitoring (Nagios ®), the helpdesk system Request Tracker (RT), various inventory tools (hInventory, OCS), or by syslog to the logging functions.

Contact: Joachim Winkler
Mobile: +49-172-2317344
Office: +49-211-699310
Mail: jwinkler@synetics.de