Health & Performance Evaluations

The health of an environment can be sifted away over time due to changes throughout the infrastructure. Like the Rubics cube, any single change affects other components and over time with multiple changes, managers start to experience more complexity or overburdened administration and system performance issues resulting in a reactive management mode instead of being proactive.

While being reactive in the short term, a proactive step would be to let us help you by identifying and resolving the cause of the issues and give you a road map for maintaining the health of the environment. Areas that we address are:

• High Availability for Operating Systems and Applications
• Disk Storage - Local, NAS and SAN
• Archive Storage/Data Management
• Systems Performance

Many times due to our vast experience with many different customers and many different environments, we are asked to provide customized consulting and solutions.  Several of these include:

• Custom application scripting
• Custom documentation and planning
• Methodology development for deployment of customer’s application
• Customized backup strategy for ISV’s software
• Customized High availability scripts for ISV’s software    

The questions are often times ignored but are worthy of asking:

• Can you guarantee that your current disaster recovery strategy would enable you to be up and running to meet business requirements?
• Has your DR plan been tested recently?
• During this test, were the applications and data accessed and tested by users to make sure that they were uncompromised?

99 times out of 100, we find customers having out-dated strategies, untested recovery plans and hopeful expectations that they will be able to recover if need be. We met with one company that said they don’t have (natural) disasters where they are located. Little did they know that several months later, a pipe would burst on the floor above flooding their data center and drowning several servers.

Our approach is designing/assessing a DR/BC strategy based on the business requirements for the recovery of systems and data. In this process we not only identify, review and assess but we present how to get you to where you need to be in order to meet the business requirements.

We look at:

• Service Level Agreements (SLA’s)
• System and data interdependencies
• High availability of systems and applications
• Data recoverability
• Current Architecture Capabilities
• Gap Analysis

High Availability

With the dependence upon technology at an all-time high, there is an ongoing challenge for IT to assure that systems are up and running around the clock.  High Availability becomes a requirement to assure SLA’s are met for the traditional critical business applications as well as email and applications that feed critical applications.