"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment" / Tom Watson

Server Administration

Are your servers in shape?

serveradminMany businesses have no servers or just a few of them that are overloaded with applications and utility software and built with no planning in mind. In the small to medium size businesses we visited, most servers are good machines but not designed at all to meet the customer’s needs. They are usually just machines setup once and rarely looked after even if the business grows  in the meantime. Technology has changed significantly lately and it should be reflected into your infrastructure.

New applications (that can be very expensive) are great but quite inefficiently used when the infrastructure lacks design to support it.
How fast can you go with a Lamborghini (the application) on an improvised village road (your network infrastructure)?
We want to recommend to you solutions where your money is well spent in a balanced way so you do not oversize anything while having bottlenecks somewhere else, resulting in a waste of your resources.

Servers play an important role in any organization and if designed well (custom designed), they can help your company grow quickly by allowing you to control it efficiently.

Whether you have no servers and you are open to hear our proposal (free of charge) or you have already invested some into it we are convinced we can help you by adding life to them, by making them part of a live mechanism, as a whole, that serve your needs in a different way than before. By live mechanism we understand a system that needs an input and it generates an output and it is for most part automated in such a way or to a degree that allows points of failure without causing a disaster; a system that can be easily recovered from any failure type of event so that your business is affected in the least possible way. We strongly suggest that you know in advance what to do and how to react should such an event occur.

We are not going to sell anything off our website, we are just going to tailor a solution for each client, face to face over a coffee or chess game if you prefer.

Bricks in the wall/Server types

bricksBut let’s say a few words about the servers themselves. We offer any brand of
servers you like but there are some that we will recommend. We treat servers as resources or bricks in the wall. You do not want to depend on their hardware platform, not now and especially not later; you just need their horsepower.
Depending on your business we will configure them with Microsoft platforms like:

Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 server for OS
ISA 2004, 2008 server for firewalls
Exchange 2003 or 2008 for email

If you prefer or if we think you need Linux servers then we will tell you why and in which situations it is better to do so.

Also, as virtualization plays a major role everywhere we will show you the best way to approach this technology that has simply revolutionized the IT industry over the last few years. We can use these products:
- VM Server or Workstation,
- VM ESX and vSphere Servers
- VM Infrastructure
- Veeam Monitoror Veeam Backup …

Our Microsoft System engineers will do their best to serve you a solution, not a machine. We know that managers want to talk business and not technical parameters so that is why we want to address the business need here rather than the technical curiosity; ask us and we will promptly respond your techie questions too.

Managers simply want to be able to talk to us and have the piece of mind that we have the big picture in our mind, that when you need us we don’t look around and try to identify wires and clean the dust first in order to find out what the problem is and then find a way to solve it. You need to know that when you just mention the problem (if any) we know exactly why and you need to know we are already prepared for what is going to happen next just because we predicted and prepared in advance for any scenario. Servers can be designed this way, with the business need in mind. We all know what downtime is when it comes to IT (the whole network or part of it and its services are down for a period of time). Servers will be designed and built depending on your own evaluation of how critical the downtime is to you.

You are more than welcome to contact us by email with questions or by phone for an appointment if you just started to have the feeling that what you paid for (until now) is just …computers.