Storage
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Take Control of Your Information Explosion Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and organizations are struggling to store and secure massive amounts of dispersed data. With Key Info storage products: your mission-critical data is safely stored and centrally available; your storage is scalable and can grow with your business; and single points of failure are reduced or eliminated. As a designated IBM Premier Business Partner Innovation Center, Key has deep storage expertise and will work with you to develop a custom storage solution to meet your needs. Best PracticesA best practice is a standard method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other mean and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a best practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered. |
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The best practices principles we follow for long-term enterprise architectural designs stem from years of integration experience working with clients in many industries. We invest consistently in certified solutions architects and engineers who serve as resident experts for specific disciplines.
Our principle architects and engineers represent across-the-board multiple disciplines. We are committed to driving integration of business value through all proposed architected solutions. For one of our best practices, we invested in a client CTO position. Our CTO focuses on evolving solution portfolios and engages in existing and emerging technologies to ensure our architects and engineers are in sync with client requirements and follow industry standards. Our CTO works closely with the technical teams, our clients, and vendor partnerships to ensure high level field integration, guaranteeing an outstanding customer experience.
For quality assurance, Key Info with the client, routinely reviews long term principles of consolidation and virtualization; enhanced data protection including nightly backup and recovery practices as well as local high availability. Disaster recovery reviews include site-to-site replication. Reviews of intelligent growth leverage advanced technologies such as storage efficiency and application-aware tools.
Key Info documents and charts procedures and practices often ignored by other organizations. During engagements, we often provide templates to standardize business process documentation.
We believe by incorporating best practices, our methodologies are strengthened, and optimum solutions are ensured for our clients over the long term.
Our Pre Implementation Delivery Methodology
Our Pre Implementation Delivery Methodology ensures that we follow best practices principles to create a long-term enterprise dat
Our approach to clients and their business initiatives is to simplify the process of Pre Implementation down to five conceptual tasks:a center architectural design. We leverage our experience, expertise and field-proven intellectual property representing years of complex systems integration going back to our founding in 1999.
Discover: We interview technologists and business leaders to gain a clear understanding of our client’s direction, business objectives, recovery point and time requirements. We conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to obtain a complete picture of the client’s topology and gain a deeper understanding of the project expectations.
Design: We architect infrastructures from existing environments up to full enterprise architectural design replacement. This includes the networks, systems, storage, virtualization, management and enhanced data protection infrastructures and processes to meet service level agreements. We also provide access to our IBM authorized Business Partner Innovation Center for proof-of-concept testing. We design solutions that are scalable for long-term growth, ease-of-use management, protecting the client’s investment.
Implement: Key Info provides on-site engineering expertise to install and configure solutions. Our team will provide integration services and implementation with professional project management. Our partnership with clients is designed to schedule, prepare, and deploy technologies with minimal disruption to IT operations. We also provide Statements of Work and Project Management Plans to guide each phase of deployment to closure.
Manage: Key Info provides retainer services for select technologies, where we serve in a staff augmentation role or as an on-site expert for your team.
Support: We provide monitoring services, layer dedicated architects and/or engineers for added support, and both provide and engage with vendor partners for contract and maintenance services.
Our Post Implementation Delivery Methodology
Key has developed a Post Implementation Delivery Methodology that is designed to meet and support pre implementation objectives as well as client objectives.
This formal methodology follows four goals:
- Clearly establish and integrate the client’s business and technology goals
- Document current architecture and to execute necessary plan modifications to reflect business and technology end goals
- Perform pre-installation review and testing and project management
- Apply best-practice principles of a long-term enterprise architectural design
Our Post Implementation Delivery Methodology for professional services is designed to ensure continuity in delivered services with professional engineering. This methodology consists of five key elements.
Configuration Planning: We focus on project definition including planning, roles, dependencies, schedule estimates, design recommendations and communications. Key Info teams perform requirements analysis by working with our client’s technical staff to document the project objectives and set expectations.
Integration: We identify the specialized technical expertise required to integrate the solution. This process involves planning of project events, resources, best practices, as well as validation and integration of host systems with application-aware tools, installation and configuration, data migration, skill transfer and cutover to the new production platform.
Knowledge Transfer: This focuses on day-to-day operational skills required by the IT operations staff to manage the solution. Key Info educates, identifies needed management tools and coaches throughout the skills transfer process. Additionally we help with the registration process on partner portals that create support tickets, and identify software downloads and knowledge base resources. We also provide architecture review meetings with the project sponsor and operations staff.
Documentation: We provide clear documentation which serve as the baseline for the state of the environment. At the conclusion of the Key Info Professional Services engagement we include a final solution Visio, hardware and software configurations. All engineering work logs and a discussion of documentation resources, web portals, are provided to support groups.
New Solution Testing: We work with clients to execute test cases developed during Configuration Planning. Issues uncovered are addressed and test cases re-executed as necessary.
Our responsibility is to translate technology into business value. We do this with our general approach to client projects: analyze, design, implement, manage and support enterprise data center solutions to meet business requirements.
Each time Key Info makes recommendations to perform integration work, we apply best-practices principles of a long-term enterprise architectural design in order to ensure an agile and scalable infrastructure. This supports our objective to ensure and protect each client’s long term IT investments.
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Lief Morin - Why IBM XIV Storage with Quicksilver? |
John Agsalud - Professional Services Methodology |
Julie Gutierrez - 5 Step Methodology |
Scott Pond -Deduplication |
