IT Support Staffing-Onsite

As Information Technology becomes an integral part of business processes, disruption of IT has come to mean business disruption. 24 X 7 availability and zero down time has become almost a universal demand.

Qualquest has been providing System Administration services for Windows and UNIX server farms of thousands of physical or virtual servers ensuring server up-time, performance management, resource utilisation & security of the servers hosting databases and business applications.

Mission critical business applications, critical databases, Customer Services such as E-Commerce Websites are often hosted on High Availability Clusters. With the advent of technology many large enterprises are building their virtual farms reducing their data center foot prints. Qualquest expertise is also garnered to services support requirements in this space.

Qualquest System Administration Services broadly covers

• Basic System Administration
  Support Unix / Windows server environments that includes OS installations & upgrade, patch management, System monitoring, Performance Management etc.

• Manage Load Balancing & High Availability (Failover) Cluster Environments
  Configure & Manage Load Balancing or High Availability (Failover) Cluster environments built using Linux , Veritas, HP , IBM or MS Windows with Veritas clustering software technology.

• Virtualization Support
  Server provisioning, data Migration, Support.

Technologies we support :

 

Mountains of data, growing at increasing speed is both a challenge (How to manage it?) and many opportunities (To improve business processes, To better understand business environment). Businesses are increasingly adopting Database Management Systems and Relational Database Management Systems to handle these challenges and exploit the opportunities.

The DBMS’s and RDBMS’s require specialised management skills to ensure integrity, efficiency, reliability and availability. Hence Database Administration (DBA) function. Like System Administration, DBA also must have cross platform expertise to manage heterogeneous environments using database software from multiple vendors.

Qualquest DBA services cover management of Oracle, Sybase, MsSql, Db2UDB database implemented in UNIX or Windows environment.

Qualquest Database Administration Services broadly covers

• Basic Database Administration
  Database Schema creation & Management, Capacity planning, Performance management & Query tuning, Ensuring Database availability, Database movement & migration, Backup & Restore databases, Ensuring data security & Auditing.

• Database High Availability Capabilities Support
  - Oracle HA Solutions: RAC, Dataguard, RMAN, Standby Database
  - Sybase ASE HA option
  - SQL Server HA Solutions: Mirroring, Log Shipping, AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances
  or Availability Groups

• Database Replication Support
  Most of the large environments, replication is used for performance & fault tolerance purposes, to ensure business data availability and consistency.

• Replication products offered by most of the database vendors help organize establish Synchronous & Asynchronous replication topologies.
  Qualquest SMEs helps customers configure & support advance replication technologies such as
• Oracle GoldenGate (Enabling replication between Oracle and Non Oracle databases)
• Oracle Streams (Enables propagation of data, transactions & events within or across database/s.)
• Sybase Replication Server

 

In the business-to-business world, where multiple enterprises establish electronic relationships, middleware administration has become the most critical component in IT infrastructure support services. Within the enterprise, a good middleware solution makes the delivery of services transparent to users. With the evolution of Middleware products information movement has been made possible between multiple environments than what it was in earlier times only between systems within single enterprise.

In the context of prevailing distributed environments, any software that provides services beyond those provided by operating system to enable the various components of a distributed system to communicate and manage data comes under purview of Middleware. However in the Infrastructure support jargon, Middleware administrators are largely responsible for managing Application Servers, Web Servers or messaging Servers, Messaging Queues etc.

Open source and Commercial Applications servers such as JBoss, WebLogic or WebSphere are commonly used in prevailing environments and Qualquest has substantial experience in managing such Application servers, Webservers, Messaging Servers in heterogeneous complex environments.

Qualquest Middleware Administration Services broadly covers

• Basic Middleware Administration which includes Install, configure, support, monitor, manage and maintain WebLogic, WebSphere Application Server & WebSphere Portal Server, MQ Series, Tomcat, IIS, Oracle Directory Server
• Build & deploy scripts for automation of day to day tasks.
• Security management within the Application Server & Web Server environment.
• System Integration & App Specific Configuration for UAT & Production environments.
• Version Migrations.
• Cluster Configuration to provide increased scalability and reliability.

Technologies we support :

Unlike Consumer or small storage devices, Enterprise Storage handles large volumes of data and large number of users. The Primary storage is the one for data being actively accessed where as the backup storage maintains the copies of primary storage data for use in disaster recovery situation.

Qualquest consultants have been managing SAN & NAS storage devices from predominant Storage Vendors EMC, Hitachi and Netapp. Extremely higher reliability, availability and scalability are the key consideration for every layer of infrastructure stack, be it an under lying storage or operating system, or databases or Applications servers or applications. Qualquest SMEs have acquired expertise over more than two decades and are confident of managing even the older versions of EMC products Clariion and Celerra or Symmetrix to new arrivals Vnx or VMax or in SAN space or Netapp Flash Array to latest FAS Series products, ensuring zero down time, building Customer confidence.

Storage Administration capabilities of Qualquest canvas include supporting EMC, Netapp, Hitachi, IBM Tivoli Storage Technologies on

• Storage installations & provisioning
• Manage Host Level tasks to access Storage
• Optimise Storage utilisation
• Capacity planning
• Migrations across Storage Technologies

With the advent of technology large enterprises have transitioned from conventional File Servers to Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) that offer ease of management and consolidation, leading to cost savings by reducing management, cooling, and power. Consequently backup solutions also were evolved that offers fast backups and recovery as was offered by conventional servers.

Increase in Volume, variety and velocity of data has been accelerating at rapid pace and new challenges are being thrown for backup and recovery practices/processes being followed in enterprises.

Backup, Recovery & Archival has become critical function for every enterprise and help reduce risk and business downtime, lowers capital & operational expenditure, fulfil compliance needs, harness value of achieved data and so on. Backups help recover information and processes in current use in case they are interrupted, corrupted, or lost. Archives help discover details of information and processes not in current use, in case they become useful again because of some unanticipated legal or regulatory event.

BURA Services by Qualquest broadly covers

• Design of Enterprise Backup Strategy
• Implementation of Backup , Recovery and Archival products
  • Symantec - Netbackup, Backup Exec
  • EMC – Networker, Avamar, Data Domain
  • IBM - Tivoli
  • HP - Data Protector (OmniBack)
• Monitoring and performance optimisation of backup infrastructure
• Migration of Backup Infrastructure

Most of the large enterprises have implemented IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework which describes how IT resources should be organised to deliver business value, documenting the processes, functions and roles of IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL Version 3 adopted more of a lifecycle approach to service management, with greater emphasis on IT business integration.

Tool Kits were developed to effectively manage various facets of ITIL such as Service Design (Service Catalogue management, Availability Management, Capacity Management), Service operations, (Service Desk, Event Management, Incident Management, Problem Management), Service Transition (Change Management, Assets & Configuration Management).

Ticketing Systems are commonly used in an organization's customer support call centre to create, update, and resolve reported customer issues

Proactive event monitoring and management has become most vital function that helps simplify management of complex IT environments.

Tools offering alerting capabilities, Tools offering central points of control for process scheduling form integral components of any large enterprise IT Infrastructure operating on ITIL framework.

Qualquest Tools Administration expertise broadly covers support for

ITSM Services

• BMC Remedy Service Management Suite
• IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
• HP OpenView Products Suite
• Nagios Suite of products

Work Load Automation

• BMC Control-M
• CA Workload Automation (Formerly CA Autosys)
• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler