Intelligent Network Solutions

The components that make up a modern, enterprise-wide IT network are diverse and complex. Ensuring that you are equipped with the network products that are right for the job, secure and value for money can be a time-consuming and continuous task.

From hardware and software, through to telecommunications and cabling we will provide you with intelligent network solutions that are completely secure and provide great value for money maximising your businesses return on its IT investment.

Quality network infrastructure solutions

Following our experience in providing network solutions for large and small organisations, we have developed partnerships with leading technology manufacturers. Therefore, we are always one of the first companies to be aware of the latest developments and how to apply these to give your network maximum benefit.

From remote, mobile and wireless network solutions that give your workforce flexibility through to reliable and secure hardware and software network infrastructure.

Our tried and tested network solutions will provide you with:

• Cost savings and improved efficiency - by utilising the latest and most secure networking hardware and software
• Increased user mobility and productivity - our network solutions increase the productivity of your key users, enabling them to have a direct impact on your bottom line
• Improved remote access for customers, partners and employees - Our VPN solutions provide secure remote access enabling your business to operate 24/7

Virtualisation Solutions, VMware Implementation & Server Consolidation Services

Business pressures are causing IT departments to be continually tasked with reducing costs and increasing service levels. At the same time they also have to build an IT infrastructure that can quickly respond to evolving business needs. Historically, increased demands have been met by adding technology resources, but this method is not only inefficient it can no longer satisfy the above criteria. Now there is a solution that can meet these conflicting requirements of virtualisation.

Virtualisation can help your organisation optimise, pool and share IT resources in a way that:

• Reduces costs
• Saves time
• Makes your IT infrastructure more flexible

What is virtualisation?

Virtualisation is the pooling and sharing of IT resources, including servers, storage and networking. In a virtualised environment, the logical functions of computing, storage and network elements are separated from their physical functions.

Elements from these pools can then be manually or automatically allocated to meet the changing needs and priorities of a business. These concepts can be applied broadly across the enterprise, from data centre resources to PCs and printers.

It enables people, processes and technology to work together more efficiently to meet increased service levels. Since capacity can be allocated dynamically, over-provisioning is eliminated and your entire IT infrastructure is simplified.

Example

Some Application Servers typically run at a mere 5-15% CPU utilisation. Transforming physical Servers into Virtual Servers and consolidating them would see an increase in utilisation by up to 80%, whilst significantly reducing running costs.”

Benefits

Virtualisation delivers quantifiable savings in both capital and operating costs by:

• Increasing hardware utilisation and reducing hardware spend
• Lowering your infrastructure costs
• Reducing your physical and carbon footprint
• Decreasing staff costs

Network Data Storage Management Services, Solutions & Implementation

The increasing amount of data that organisations need to store and access has been growing exponentially over the last few years. If you are:

• Frequently running out of disk space
• Receiving regular complaints because your servers are not operating at peak performance
• Experiencing regular outages because of storage-related issues
• Having frequent problems with your backups and backup windows

Then you need to consider a storage management solution.

Our services

There are a number of mature storage management platforms that are now available. These include:

• SAN - Storage Area Network
• NAS - Network Attached Storage

1 . Network Solutions - Storage Area Network (SAN)

A SAN is a dedicated network that is separate from other LANs and WANs that may already be implemented in your organisation. It generally serves to interconnect the storage-related resources that are connected to one or more servers.

It is often characterised by its high data transfer rates between member storage peripherals and by its highly scalable architecture. Though typically described in terms of hardware, SANs very often include specialised software for their management, monitoring and configuration.

SANs are assembled from unique hardware components. These components are configured to form the physical SAN itself and usually include a variety of equipment. RAID storage systems, hubs, switches, bridges, servers, backup devices, interface cards and cabling can be connected to form a storage system that provides the resources that facilitate the policies of an IT organisation.

The benefits of a SAN

The key benefit of implementing a SAN is to provide centralised data storage operations and management. Administering the storage resources in high-growth and mission-critical environments can be daunting and very expensive. SANs can dramatically reduce the management costs and complexity of these environments while providing significant technical advantages.

Our services

It is very important to select the hardware devices (and their configuration) for a SAN with care and consideration. To help you in this process we have partnered with HP a leading manufacturer of SAN solutions.

Our experience and expertise will help you through all stages of the process including:

• Design
• Implementation
• Support

Helping to guarantee that your SAN investment will be a success and provide a real ROI.

2 .NAS - Network Attached Storage

NAS is essentially hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to the individual or department that it is serving.

It sits between an application server and a file system. By treating storage access and its management in this way both the application and files can be accessed faster because they are not competing for the same processor resources. The NAS device is attached to the LAN and assigned an IP address, file requests are then mapped by the main server to the NAS file server.

The benefits of NAS

• A NAS system is essentially a plug-and-play storage solution based on industry standard networking architecture. This means that you can add NAS appliances to the network within minutes without having to take the LAN down
• NAS devices increase storage-on-the-fly capabilities which allow you to redirect network traffic and reduce the need to add more network nodes. You can offload high-bandwidth file serving tasks from the network server leading to reduced latency
• You can perform backups without affecting server performance
• NAS lets you connect to multiple OSs and share data amongst disparate clients and servers. It supports both the Network File System (NFS) protocol for UNIX and the Common Internet Files System (CIFS) for Microsoft to facilitate cross-platform data sharing

Our services

It is very important to select the hardware devices for a NAS solution with care and consideration. To help you in this process we have partnered with HP, a leading manufacturer of NAS technologies designed to run in the Windows server environment.

Our experience and expertise will help you through all stages of the process including:

• Design
• Implementation
• Support

Helping to guarantee that your NAS investment will be a success and provide a real ROI.