Have you ever come into the office and been blindsided by a horde of angry coworkers screaming, “Insert critical IT system here is down again!!” and no one in the office can work?

Enter our hero…the hard-working and dedicated system administrator.  He enters the server room and begins diagnosing the problem.

He says, “It looks like the server crashed around 1:00 a.m. from a critical failure.”

Now management is watching the minutes turn into hours of unproductive employee utilization while the IT staff works feverishly to restore service.

If remote network device monitoring had been in place, the IT staff would have been alerted immediately of the failure and could have responded so the impact was avoided during business hours.

While remote network monitoring is extremely valuable for alerting of critical failures, it becomes a strong value-add when used to proactively address issues before they create an unplanned outage.  For example, most platforms will generate informational warnings when hard drive space becomes low.  This allows the situation to be addressed before the server runs out of space and begins having problems.  Couple that with other important services, such as email, CPU and memory performance, network utilization and more to create a proactive approach to maintaining overall system uptime.

Remote monitoring platforms, such as N-able and Level Platforms, can also be used to automate routine tasks such as patch management, asset and license management, support and warranty service tracking and remote support.  Powerful reporting functions provide trending information of service metrics to round out the package, giving the information needed to fine-tune system performance and plan for IT investments.

Rapid and efficient integration of acquisitions is crucial to realize promised synergies and generate more capital to be back in the buyer’s seat. For companies with a weak IT infrastructure, seamless integration may seem unattainable.

In one recent case, a Houston-based master limited partnership (MLP) company in the oil and gas industry had trouble integrating acquisitions, causing a bottleneck in its growth momentum. Growth through acquisition is an integral part of a MLP’s business strategy. The company’s network infrastructure, security design and deficient IT processes created obstacles, congesting the integration of acquired companies.

To solve this business technology issue, it was necessary to engineer a network infrastructure that could support additional geophysical and geological applications, and support terabytes of new seismic and well data.

Engineering this infrastructure required specialists to…

• Design processes to migrate 12 business units, with 300 computers in 6 remote locations, onto a single network
•Analyze the data and security requirements of each application to support the new acquisition
•Identify and examine user configurations, data ownership and location, and security issues
•Create a plan to preserve and reconcile any issues before merging the two networks

Once the plan for the technical merger was created and tested, coordination was required among the MLP’s vendors and IT resources to execute the migration of the acquisition’s hardware, software and data assets. A custom software application was written to automate the migration of user accounts, applications and data into the company’s technology environment. Automation streamlined the process, guaranteed consistency and reduced the chance for human error.

With improvements to the network infrastructure and strengthened IT processes, an MLP is able to seamlessly assimilate new acquisitions within projected timelines. Executives are then able to focus attention to business development rather than on IT frustrations.

Check out this VMware video on its Infrastructure 3 solutions. It shows you how you can give people access to your virtual environment, how to provision new servers, how to protect the environment against failures and how to load balance the workload across multiple servers.

Virtualization technology has been around since the heyday of the mainframe era – the period of massive back-office computing rooms.  However, virtualization has gained increasing popularity over the last few years as companies seek to enhance their return on investment (ROI) from computing hardware while decreasing associated costs such as data center power, cooling and support costs.

By leveraging virtualization, businesses reduce IT costs associated with complex computing environments.  Vmware, the virtualization powerhouse, describes it as such…

“Virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical limitations. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high availability of resources, better desktop management, increased security and improved disaster recovery processes.”

Virtualization transforms hardware – including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller – into software, creating a virtual machine running its own operating system and applications like a personal computer.

The introduction of virtualization technology presents a number of opportunities for driving capital and operational efficiency beyond the benefit of safely hosting different server roles on one piece of hardware.  RSA Corp harnesses the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity, provide better service levels and streamline IT processes by leveraging the VMware virtualization solution.

Dramatic benefits of virtualization technologies include:

• Increased utilization rates for servers (A 60-80% utilization rate versus 5-15% in non-virtualized hardware)
• Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualized
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• An 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime
• Faster testing of patches and other critical updates

By disconnecting the software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure, virtualization aggregates multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources, which can be delivered dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed. This pioneering approach enables organizations to build computing infrastructures with high levels of utilization, availability, automation and flexibility using building blocks of powerful servers.

Comparison of “Static Computing” vs. “Virtual Computing”:

Looking for someone to help manage your virtualization initiatives…RSA Corp can help!