The Kendal Corporation Maintains Optimal Network Health with WhatsUp Gold

The senior care community leverages WhatsUp Gold with Configuration Management and Network Traffic Analysis

Kendal's Challenge

More than 1,200 users on a network spanning eight states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest rely on Kendal’s IT network to manage the company’s continuing care retirement communities.

Kendal describes its ultimate goal for senior care as: “the transformation of our culture’s view of aging, of older persons, and of the potential for fulfillment and continuing contribution during the later stages of life.”

About Kendal

• First senior care community opened 1973 in Chester county Pennsylvania
• Influenced by Quaker traditions of equality, peace, simplicity, integrity and community
• 10 active facilities and an 11th under development
• Headquarters in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

Making the Transition from Reactive to Proactive with WhatsUp Gold

Carlos Menendez, Manager of Network Operations, joined Kendal 12 years ago. As Kendal grew, Menendez became increasingly intolerant of finding out from the company’s internal customers that they couldn’t get on the network. “It just did not look good,” he comments. “We had to find a way to be alerted to problems before we got a phone call.”

The IT department had installed WhatsUp Gold years ago but had never done a network discovery. Menendez decided to find out exactly what the software Kendal already owned could do for the company. He contacted Ipswitch and asked for assistance.

“Once Professional Services met with us and fully explained what the software could do, we realized we owned a ‘gold’ mine. Now I can’t imagine being without WhatsUp Gold.”

WhatsUp Gold Helps Kendal Manage:

Headquarters:

• 100 virtual servers and 12 vmWare ESX hosts
• 20 physical servers
• 10 48-port switches
• 3 Cisco routers
• 2 Cisco ASA firewalls

Remote communities:

• 10 virtual and 3 physical servers
• Centralized services including electronic medical records, marketing, new residents, 24x7 medical records retrieval, Human Resources, and payroll.

The company’s 4-person WhatsUp Gold team relies on email and SMS alerts to stay in touch with the network.

During the Professional Services engagement, Menendez also learned about key plug-ins he could benefit from: Configuration Management and Network Traffic Analysis.

Configuration Management is used to compare the startup and current configurations of devices. “I get a notification when a configuration changes, then I can compare the two side by side to see what was altered,” explains Menendez.

"WhatsUp Gold makes it easy for us to identify problems ahead of our users. We also found it can keep our network safer. When Network Traffic Analysis reported excessive packets generated, we used the information to track down spyware. Now that I better understand its capabilities, WhatsUp Gold will be helping Kendal for the foreseeable future.”