Network Design

If your network is in its infancy, or suffers from growing pain, it's the right time to properly design the system for maximum reliability and minimal maintenance.

Most networks today evolve into the business systems you see before you. The basic applications are installed on machines as required, with more applications and hardware added as the need arises. In the early stages, such a solution is attractive for its low cost and overhead. However, choosing to evolve rather than design your network will invariably lead to problems as the business grows because there are rarely suitable provisions made for:

• Reliability - Can one failure bring the entire system down? Can you spot the failures before service suffers?
• Expandability - Can your network grow as demand grows? Will it be affordable, or prohibitively expensive?
• Disaster recovery - Can you continue operations if your physical site is unavailable due to connectivity problems or natural disaster?
• Security - What are you storing and who can get at it? What happens if the wrong people get to this data? What can they do once they're "in"?
• Reputation - What does a "500 Error, service unavailable" message say about you to your customers? Is "Sorry, our system is down" an acceptable business practice?

By properly designing your network to address these issues you will minimize your operational costs, minimize your downtime, and maximize your customer satisfaction. Our design process will include everything you need to get your system under control, and working for you:

• Needs Audit - We help you define what you need to accomplish and what your applications need to meet your goals.
• Capacity Planning - How many customers do you want to serve now and how many in the future? We will design the system to accommodate growth and let you know the stages at which to expand.
• Documentation - Everything we do will be presented to you in written form. There is no magic and nothing is hidden. This includes how we built it, and what procedures to take to keep it running.
• Implementation - We will install and configure the system as laid out by the design.
• Testing - Before releasing anything as finished, we will make sure that everything works as intended, with documented results.
• Support - After releasing the finished network, we will be on hand to make sure there are no surprises

If you just need help installing/running a software package or want advice on how to do something, we are available to help you in any way we can.

Whether you need Active Directory configured or want advice on how to connect your Linux machines to a SAN (redundantly), we can provide you with the service you want. If you lack the expertise or time to do it yourself, we can help. All our support includes any documentation you want, advice if we see something that could be improved, or warning if we find anything that could be of potential danger. Software and hardware we support can be found on our services page.