ACTIVITIES

Buying Reliable In buying reliable technology and components, the solutions we architect are able to achieve a sustainable level of reliability to provide years of consistent operation. Our technology partners are all strategic thus ensuring that we have selected components from a suite of building blocks that come with history of being reliable. We make sure our partners provide us with promising road maps aligned with our architecture requirements, along with a proper support organization, we can also assure that the partners are reliable also. Implementing Redundancy Todays infrastructures need to embrace multiple levels of infrastructure redundancy in the compute, network, storage and security domains. In many cases, redundancy is the only salvation to achieving business continuity. Host availability to run virtual machines, ability to restore terabyte sized email and file servers, maintaining connectivity and safeguarding your network perimeter and Internet access are all addressed by the implementation of redundancy. Avoid Recovery We believe our customers treat recovery as an act of last resort and that the solutions we architect should inherently avoid recovery.  
This is more a result of buying reliability and implementing redundancy as strategic approaches to infrastructure. 
The overall benefits to our customers is that our solutions are architected to achieve business continuity and recovery and more specifically disaster reovery is a subset of business continuity. Given the choice, we believe that achieving business continuity also delivers disaster recovery. Flexibility and Repurposeability Flexibility drives repurposeability. Today’s business demands flexibility due to the speed of business and the need for our customers to not only run on solid infrastructures, but also the need for it to address their needs in a flexible manner. Flexibility comes from the ability to respond to operational, financial and technical business unit demands. This can only be achieved if the infrastructure is flexible, otherwise, the lack of flexibility creates the dreaded infrastructure traffic jam. The needs will be addressed but when is another question… Flexibility also drives the ability of a given infrastructure to be repurposed. Those same business unit needs will demand that the infrastructure be repurposed as the business evolves. We believe these abilities contribute extensively to business agility and a company’s ability to leverage their IT infrastructure as a competitive advantage. A key enabler for flexibility and specifically repurposeability is a large investment in software-based and software-defined infrastructure tools. Scalability and Time to Scale All solutions need to be scalable as a specification but their ability to be scaled with a reasonable time to scale is imperative. Scalability for a customer is associated with business growth and having the ability to scale the compute, storage, network and security domains in short and predictable times is a must have. Affordability All of the above wanted characteristics although very desirable need to be affordable to be considered. We always architect our solutions both technically and financially. We analyze our partners’ offerings by taking into account their capabilities, performance, scalability and specifically their affordability. We measure our customers’ ability to acquire, support and manage the infrastructure we architect. The optimal solutions we architect are the ones that are reliable, implement redundancy, avoid recovery, are flexible and repurposeable, scalable and affordable. We achieve this using proven tools, strategies and methodologies such as agile project management, production of paperless and managed documentation as well as change-management to architect the right solution for our customers. Design Build We make sure that our customers receive valid designs based on our proposed architectures and we assist our customers in building out the solution effectively. During the Design phase, we specifically focus on baselining, validation and knowledge. 

Baselining Understanding the ability of a given architecture to deliver computing, connectivity, capacity and security is crucial.  
By deploying the proposed infrastructure independently of the existing infrastructure, we have the ability to baseline the effectiveness of the components which allows our customers to better exploit this once deployed. Baselining assists in maintenance, troubleshooting, upgrading and management of the solution once it is built and deployed. Validation Validating the architecture allows us to optimize the solution and provide our customers with the confidence that the technologies and components provided by the vendors are behaving as expected.  
Many times, customers purchase technology and components solely on a vendor specification to then find out the combination of these is not behaving as expected or to spec.  
Validating the technologies and the components and more importantly their interactions prior to implementation and deployment is important and provides our customers with a sense of predictability and assurance of the infrastructures abilities and capabilities.  
Knowledge Since our solutions are meant to empower our customers and put them in control, the most crucial aspect of this phase is knowledge.  
It is imperative that our customer IT team have pre-deployment experience on the proposed infrastructure technologies and components.  
How many times is our customers’ IT team given technology that needs to be deployed “into” an existing infrastructure without kicking the tires, experiencing the technologies and components first hand and having the ability to tear it up and down to properly understand the mechanics of the solution. Our approach guarantees that the customer’s IT team is fully versed on the proposed solution “before” it is implemented and deployed.