Server Consolidation / Virtualisation - A Virtual Reality!
As enterprises grow, IT organisations have historically added computing capacity in the form of new servers. The resulting ‘server sprawl’ is costly in terms of investment and people needed to operate, manage and upgrade servers.
Virtualisation allows organisations to mask the services provided by individual systems and place them in a virtual environment. Simply, virtualisation increases resource sharing and utilisation whilst maintaining the capacity to expand later.
As virtualisation specialists, we work with customers to fully exploit the benefits of implementing a virtual infrastructures.
Commencing with Capacity Planning, our accredited engineers deliver a snapshot of your environment and outline the potential consolidation ratio.
Upon acceptance, the next stage converts existing physical systems into ‘Virtual Machines’ (VMs), held on a ‘pool’ of virtual servers - this process is known as P2V (Physical to Virtual). As the process of testing and development proceeds, the existing physical systems continue to provide services to users.
Client Virtualisation
Managing an IT environment can often be an exercise in balancing cost with service. Specifically, PCs present organisations with key challenges:
- Management
- Total cost of ownership
- Security
- Inefficient utilisation
Virtualisation continues to be a hot topic for IT professionals. As organisations continue to experience the benefits of virtualisation in x86-based server computing, similar technologies are being applied to the client environment.
Clients are difficult to standardise; increasingly, users require access to their desktop from anywhere, and the relatively low cost of hardware is often offset by the high cost of management and support.
To address these needs, VMware provides Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and VMware ACE to secure and simplify client virtualisation. In addition, when combined with d2's desktop services, organisations can benefit from a complete solution
Storage Consolidation - Maximising return from your data
It is estimated that data is increasing at almost 80% per year. The way organisations process data, whether on e-mail systems or databases, presents IT departments with some key challenges:
- Effective management of information from creation to deletion
- Treating data based on its relevance in terms of availability, performance, recovery, and retention
- Automating and enforcing specific policies
- Adhering to government guidelines for data controls
Historically, IT departments have employed Direct Attached Storage or Disk Array solutions. However, as complexity and volumes of data increase, so does the requirement to centralise management, maximise capacity and effectively back-up and archive data.
Through bringing technologies together, d2 offers a wide range of storage solutions that effectively place and support data throughout its life cycle.
Cryoserver
Cryoserver is the world's leading forensic email archiving and email compliance solution including all attachments, instant messaging and other electronic records. Enterprises, businesses and governments rely on Cryoserver for assurance surrounding the retention and access of critical business, operational and publicly held information.
Cryoserver is a sealed appliance providing a complete, audited, tamper-evident repository of emails sent to, from and around an organization, suitable for legal and regulatory compliance and for providing email archive data in court with high evidential weight. Cryoserver is often likened to a black box flight recorder for electronic communications combined with internet search engine-like performance for email forensic investigations.
Only Cryoserver is designed to provide the combination of:
- High levels of Information Assurance
- A complete unbroken forensic record of email communications at arms length from existing operational systems and administration.
- Adherence to data protection requirements.
- Audited, reliable records for mediation and risk reduction purposes.
- A plug and play appliance without need for lengthy implementation or ongoing configuration by customers.
- A solution simple and affordable enough for use by small businesses and scalable and practical enough for deployment by global enterprises and service providers.
- Availability as a choice of stand-alone appliance, mirrored high resilient or virtualized server environment for a managed service.
Storage Area Networking (SAN)
SAN solutions provide raw storage capacity directly to servers over a dedicated infrastructure, that can be tailored to meet your specific requirements and budget.
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
NAS solutions are designed to serve files to clients over a network employing integrated software that supports multi-protocol environments, snapshots, replication and volume expansion.
NAS/SAN Fusion
NAS/SAN fusion provides an ideal solution that increases the amount of available data and accessible storage, yet reduces the required number of servers.
