Dan Transportation

Dan Transportation is the largest transportation company in Israel, consisting of a group of holding companies under the umbrella of Dan Capital. Dan Bus Company is an Israeli bus company based in Tel Aviv.

Dan Transportation has a fleet of 1,300 buses packed with technology in each bus such as location via GPS services, arrival times, collection and passenger info. The company has 2,500 employees and its buses transport 14 million passengers every month.

Dan Transportation has 700 users in 50 different sites which utilize a SBC technology called Jetro Cockpit (which serves as an alternative to RDS / Citrix XenApp).  In addition Dan employs mostly virtualized (on VMWare ESXi) datacenters carrying about 150 server VMs on which they run their CRM, ERP and other business critical applications.

Asaf Saban, the Group CTO oversees IT for Dan transportation and other companies in the holding group. Dan outsource most of their IT operations to an external company while Asaf and his small team are responsible for selecting the tools and choosing overall architecture and strategy. Asaf needs to stay on top of industry innovations and constantly look for new technology and better solutions for his business.

When Asaf first saw Controlup in VMworld 2017 he was captivated by the intuitive aggregated view (grids) and the ease with which you could drill down from the VM to the user (session) and even to the processes – “It felt like a multi target task manager on steroids and that was so powerful”, said Asaf.

He immediately recognized that Controlup can help his small team and the outsourced team shorten many of their daily tasks and better control their virtualized data center. Today, ten months after deployment Asaf is very happy with his decision and gets constant value from the solution.

ControlUp’s intuitive color coded stress level system made a lot of sense to Asaf – seeing the traffic light system as it applies to any resource with stress level indications as well as being able to customize the stress level thresholds and apply different threshold settings to different types of resources was very useful and powerful.

The capability of executing tasks on multiple objects in one go is a huge benefit for both troubleshooting and management. Dan’s IT team uses the controllers regularly to carry out actions on bulks of managed resources in a single click. Asaf recalled how just last week when they had to switch from daylight saving time (which is something each IT team can relate to) they were able to organize the VM grids with the time columns showing real-time data in each and immediately zero in on the 15 servers that did not update properly. They then proceeded to updating all 15 servers’ time in a swift, single action.  

Another case where Asaf recalls time and effort saved was when the IT team updated the antivirus version on all their servers, only to realize that four VMs didn’t update for an unknown reason. The team then proceeded to use the ControlUp registry controller which enabled them  to quickly isolate the issue to an older version that was not properly removed. At that point it was all too easy to take action to fix it in one go on all four servers and reapply the new version.

While not addressing an immediate pain point, the merit of using ControlUp in an IT environment of this large transportation company is clear. Faster response times, easy troubleshooting and quick recognition and resolution of any issues at hand are an everyday occurance. Carrying out actions on bulks of machines in one go is also a huge time saver and a practical tool in their IT toolbelt. With ControlUp, Dan Transportation was able to keep a lean IT team and maximize the impact of the outsourced IT teams.