In the past businesses critical applications were typically run on mini or mainframe systems with comprehensive support and management tools backed up by a full-time on-site operations team. These are often combined with manufacturer's support contracts and disaster recovery plans. Today's business critical applications could just as easily be delivered by an Intel server either housed centrally, within a department or in a branch office. The question is why should this server receive less attention than traditional critical business systems? If the answer is they shouldn't, then what are the options available to you?
We asked Mark Howarth , Associate Director of Servo to give us his views on the pros and cons of traditional server support.
Option 1 - Do nothing
Mark Howarth set the scene by stating: "This option clearly has the lowest initial cost but equally carries the greatest risk and can lead to much greater costs in the long term. We all know that modern servers are extremely reliable and can be configured with built in resilience and redundancy - but when they go wrong how many users will be affected and for how long? Can you genuinely afford to be without e-mail, invoicing or payroll for 2 days or more?" Mark added "A lot of people rely on the standard warranty from the major manufacturers without reading the small print. Customers think they have an 8 hour service but typically there is no guaranteed fix, and whilst an engineer may be there in 8 hours it is of little use if he doesn't have the spares to complete the repair."
Option 2 - Take out an extended warranty service or traditional
support contract
"This is often a very cost effect way of improving on the standard manufacturers service as it extends the warranty to more closely match the requirement of the business either by improving the response and fix time and/or extending the service window" advised Mark. "But there's a downside because it's reactive. This type of service is hardware centric and as we all know, many server problems are related to the system build, data corruption, viruses, or even someone simply deleting a file and then finding the tape back-up has failed. These problems will not be resolved by a traditional support contract and so either a separate software support contract is required or a skilled internal support team must be maintained."
Option 3 - Employ a dedicated server support team
The most expensive option, but does it deliver the best results? We asked Mark for his view "The answer could be yes but equally it depends on the skills developed and maintained by your staff and their ability to support the infrastructure. For example, can they cover a 24 x 365 requirement? Can they reach the extremes of your organisation? Do they have access to all of the replacement parts and key manufacturer service advisories to ensure that the systems can be maintained reliably? This is rarely the case as the majority of organisations I speak to cannot afford the depth of resource required to deliver a comprehensive support service for critical systems completely in house."
So what's the answer for business-critical servers?
Mark went on to explain his recommendation for an integrated server support strategy. He believes this approach takes the best features of options one to three, whilst also taking advantage of the tools and resources available from the leading manufacturers and software authors. He explained "To be truly integrated, your service partner has to be flexible and encompass both software and hardware services. The service should be targeted at improving server availability at a cost effective price."
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Mark added: "The key benefit of such a service is that it focuses on server availability and not problem resolution. Servers are monitored for hardware degradation and impending problems. Software is monitored for patches, fixes, and updates in line with manufacturer's service advisories and an upgrade plan agreed. With the leading Tier 1 hardware manufacturers such as HP, IBM or Fujitsu-Siemens impending hardware failures are predicted up to 96 hours before a failure occurs allowing a planned service action to be carried out. Software updates can be planned and implemented to minimise the risk of a hack, trojan, worm or virus attack. Regular housekeeping such as back-ups and anti-virus pattern updates are routinely tested to confirm that they are operational. Customers that take this service from Servo also have the added benefit of having our technical support team on hand to provide operating system and application support for many of the key server based applications."
Mark has been recommending flexible managed service solutions to customers for almost 15 years. He is proud of Servo's track record and shared a recent commendation Servo had received from one of his long standing customers: "I would like to take this opportunity to give a huge thank you for the support delivered to our organisation over the last year. I would especially like to thank the technical support team for the delivery of an exceptional managed service. I'm sure that Servo will continue to be part of our service delivery projects especially after delivering 100% service availability since January of last year."
Servo's critical server support services
Servo has grouped together a collection of services to provide a complete support package for critical servers. For more information:
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