Services Overview

Data Center Migration

On our homepage we suggest that there are three critical success factors to know before considering migrating or consolidating a data center.   The first of these is, have you done one before?   If you haven’t, don’t!  Find someone that has!   A data center migration is an extremely complex project which requires careful planning and execution.  At a minimum, a strategy and a plan should be developed by a team that has extensive experience and significant scars in relocations.
  
This brings us to our second and third critical success factors.  #2 - Never plan to do a data center migration with your own staff even after acknowledging critical success factor #1, and #3 – Do plan to have your key server, storage, and network resource join the migration team and backfill them so that they do not have ‘day jobs’.  Adopting these three critical success factors will help to insure the success of your company's data center migration project.

System Infrastructure Innovators employs a strategic, cafeteria-style methodology that helps your company determine where you are today (current state), where you would like to be (future state) and viable alternatives on how your company can get from the current state to the future state (migration paths).  There are many techniques available that can enable a seamless, non-disruptive migration between locations across town or across countries.  

Contact us to schedule a meeting to discuss your company's migration objectives and the appropriate level of strategic planning necessary to provide your company a solid foundation for a data center migration project.

Business Availability/Data Loss Prevention Assessments

System Infrastructure Innovators (SII) has designed, implemented and tested business continuity, operational recovery, and data loss prevention capabilities for hundreds of data centers/server rooms and thousands of servers.  As a result, SII has amassed a significant amount of knowledge on these subjects.  Our key value proposition is to leverage our “cafeteria style” methodology providing our clients with a customized offering, tailored to their specific requirements.

SII’s Assessment offering is designed to provide your company with a quick, but effective, assessment of your company’s ability to recover from an Incident.  This assessment is for companies who want to insure that their business availability and data loss prevention plans are being implemented and will enable them to address any gaps in their plan or in their implementation of those plans.

Some of the key areas we focus on during an assessment are:
  • Do you know how to communicate with your staff in an emergency?  Does your staff know how to communicate with you in an emergency?
  • Does your staff know what to do in severe weather or when the power is out in your office or in their home?
  • Can your staff access your local or alternate site remotely and can they perform their necessary business functions?
  • Has your company adequately protected your systems and data?
  • Is 100% of your data backed up, off-site, and has the media has been tested for recoverability?
  • If you have an alternate IT site, have you tested your ability to recover your systems and data successfully at that site?
  • If you have to recover at your alternate site, can you subsequently fail back to your primary site?
Conducting an assessment is a good start to providing the information you need to help consider the appropriate level of Incident preparedness for your company.   Contact us now to make an appointment.

Data Archiving & Records Management

Consider the following “simplified” scenario. You own a successful online retail novelty store and you have been in business for 10 years. You purchase your merchandise from one hundred different sources. You have 3,000 very satisfied customers and 10 unsatisfied customers. You make 3 purchases each year from each vendor. Each of your customers makes a purchase twice each year and you get one complaint a year from each of your unsatisfied customers. Let’s look at the following. 

After 10 years in business:
  • You have 3,000 invoices from your vendors
  • You have 60,000 Sales Orders from your customers
  • You have had 100 complaints from your unsatisfied customers
Why are you paying for 63,000 records to be instantly available to you while over the past 10 years you have only needed to retrieve 100?

Consider you are a company called Viewpointe and you are responsible for the imaging of consumer checks for some of the largest financial institutions in the United States. You are storing over 130 billion checks. Over the 7 years that the checks are required to be kept, at most, only 3% of the checks will ever be requested. This environment raises (at least) two questions:
  • How do you back up these 130 billion checks every Friday night? (You don’t, you archive)
  • What spinning disk storage media do you use for these checks? (You do and you don’t – You use a hierarchical storage management approach that minimizes the total cost of ownership over the life and access expectations of the data as opposed to the life of the media.)
Almost all of this data becomes JIC data (see the White Paper). Understanding how to leverage data archiving and a good records management program can save your company a lot of time and money. Archiving, using WORM technology (Write Once, Read Many), can also be used to protect important company records from accidental or intentional alteration or destruction. In many cases, archiving using WORM technology is considered best practices for protecting many records for regulatory compliance.

Our company was the original developer of nine (9) patents in data archiving (see our Patents Page) while working for IBM and can help your company put a plan in place to protect your vital company electronic records, or images of your company’s assets.  Contact us now to make an appointment to discuss how our archiving techniques can lower your costs and help to protect your company’s data assets.