Storage & Systems Professional Services
Budgets are finite and calendars are full. To be truly successful, a sound infrastructure strategy requires time and resources that most IT organizations can't afford to remove from the day-to-day demands of fighting fires and keeping the data center running. It requires storage and system experts who can step back and objectively see the "big picture."
GCA Storage & System Professionals can provide:
Assessment & Planning
Our storage and systems consultants work with you to assess your current capabilities, identify future requirements to support your business, and what gaps exist between the two. Other services help you to project and document growth rates.
In order to get the most out of your IT assets, it is essential to understand the capabilities and assets you already possess by taking stock of your entire infrastructure. GCA's Capabilities Audit service provides you with an analysis of your existing storage and systems capabilities, the various components being used, and how they might be used more effectively.
Capacity Planning. Last-minute hardware, software, or network changes can have a detrimental impact on budgeting, planning, and project schedules. Whether you are stabilizing your current environment, planning for new projects, or reengineering your data center, you need to understand the implications for your infrastructure and the resulting effects on your IT budget and customers. These impacts could include response times, service costs, service level agreements, and others. GCA's Capacity Planning service helps you avoid unplanned downtime, lapses in protection, and unexpected expenditures by periodically determining and documenting projected growth, and clearly defining the time-phased resources needed to support it.
GCA consultants analyze current and future capacity requirements. Analysis includes projected rates of growth at all data centers, as well as peak requirements and trends. After a thorough review of the computing environment and business plans, consultants work with your staff to plan capacity needs.
Disaster Recovery Planning. While data is the lifeblood of many organizations, these same organizations are often unaware of their vulnerabilities to data loss and the associated costs. It is estimated that only 43% of businesses that suffer an incapacitating disaster ever resume operations. It is crucial for organizations to prepare for unplanned outages in order to reduce the risk to their revenue and to protect their data assets and customers. GCA's Disaster Recovery Planning service identifies your vulnerabilities and helps ensure your ability to quickly restore access to critical data in the event of a disaster.
GCA consultants deliver a Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan that identifies which data is critical, the priorities and metrics for recovery, a detailed action timeline, and a thorough test plan. The plan provides multiple data center disaster scenarios and provisional plans for each from the loss of a single mission critical file through the loss of a data center.
Capabilities Audit. In order to get the most out of your IT assets, it is essential to understand the capabilities and assets you already possess by taking stock of your entire infrastructure. Our storage and systems consultants work with you to assess your current capabilities, identify future requirements to support your business, and what gaps exist between the two. GCA's service provides you with an analysis of your existing storage and systems, the various components being used, and how they might be used more effectively. Other services help you to project and document growth rates.
Architecture Design Services
IT organizations are as familiar as anyone with the phrase "nothing is constant except change." If not properly planned, IT changes can wreak havoc on the overall success of an entire organization.
GCA Architecture Design Services include an analysis of the impact of new technologies on your environment. GCA helps you ensure that new technologies are integrated with the least amount of impact on your operations.
Architecture Plan. The Architecture Plan serves as the basis for future technology acquisitions and planning. The plan defines all relevant infrastructure components required to support the new strategy, as well as best practices and a properly aligned operational model.
GCA offers several options within the Architecture Design Service. We can assist in developing an overall strategy for the enterprise, or for a specific technology such as SAN, NAS, Clustering, High Availability, and others.
Functional Architecture. GCA consultants develop either a single architecture or multiple architectures depending on your needs. Multiple architectures are sometimes requested for various budget and performance targets. You receive either an RFP ready for issue to vendors or a high-level design document, including drawings and suggested configurations, for your organization to use internally. The Functional Architecture identifies various vendors that, based on GCA's experience, are best able to solve the issues of redundancy, scalability, performance, and compatibility with retained legacy assets.
Detailed Architecture. The Functional Architecture is used as a basis for the Detailed Architecture a definition of the specific solution components which must be included in the final operational solution. Upon completion of the Detailed Architecture, you will be in a position to issue POs to final vendors when the test plan is complete.
Implementation & Project Management
Planning is only a small piece of implementing new technology, projects, or processes. The implementation phase and ongoing change management are equally important. GCA can help you implement system and storage projects and plans from start to finish, or assist you only in specific areas where you require added expertise. We can help you complete your projects on time and within budget.
The backgrounds and experience of our technical consultants enable them to view implementation and management issues not only from an objective, outside-in perspective, but also from the inside-out. Our consultants understand the "real world" pressures surrounding limited budgets and service disruptions, and work with you to develop low-risk implementation plans, as well as low-cost optimization projects, that are feasible for your organization's budget and schedule.
Reducing the Complexity. Complex technology implementation projects require specialized skills and a disciplined approach to be successful. As technology becomes faster and more feature-rich, the problems of complexity and interoperability seem to be escalating. Today's typical large enterprise uses multiple disk and tape solutions, server OS platforms, LAN and WAN protocols, as well as various system management and storage utilities, such as multiple backup applications or SRM utilities. These implementation projects, therefore, require a wider variety of skills than any single hardware or software vendor can provide.
GCA provides both the project management and technical/product skills required for success in such complex, multi-vendor environments. GCA can provide a single point of contact for your most complex implementation challenges, providing multi-vendor project management, installation, testing, configuration, performance tuning, data migration, etc. With GCA as the primary provider of implementation services for your new technology deployment, you can avoid missed production deadlines, and the associated finger-pointing, that sometimes occurs when multiple vendors provide services within a common environment.
Performance & Rescue Optimization
GCA's Optimization Services help you address these issues and more. Our consultants enable you to get the most out of your existing IT investments by helping you improve procedures, fine-tune system configurations, shift resource allocations, and perform software version upgrades.
Backup Process Optimization. GCA consultants help you improve the quality and efficiency of your backup and restore processes by defining and documenting best practice procedures and fully utilizing the capabilities available with the technologies you have in place today.
Asset Redeployment. The storage and systems available in most data centers are drastically underutilized. By better matching existing resources with your requirements, GCA consultants enable you to fully utilize the 'hidden capacity' in your existing infrastructure.
Storage and Systems Consolidation. GCA enables you to greatly improve manpower and/or equipment utilization by combining disparate procedures and resources into a single process supporting multiple systems.
Software Upgrades. Upgrading to your software vendor's current version often can provide improved performance and problem fixes, as well as valuable new features, at minimal cost. GCA can install and test upgrades to most popular products with little or no disruption to your daily operations
