Technology Solution Design

CONTENTENGINEER : Technology Advisory Services provide a vendorneutral design capability and advice on reviewing, acquiring, managing electronic data storage systems. The Services have evolved to accommodate all aspects including hierarchical tiered storage (with online, nearline and offline components), backup/recovery and long term archive. The Group can design solutions and advise clients on the latest advances in functionality, the optimum combination of hardware and software technologies plus appropriate operational processes and procedures to maximise availability of data whilst also complying with the latest statute, regulation and best practice.

Service Benefits

• Acceleration of profits through efficiency and avoidance of waste
• Maximised return on existing and future investments in technology
• Reduction in capital investment and ongoing expense and management costs
• Reduction in measured total cost of ownership
• Optimised purchasing by leveraging vendor roadmaps and financial cycles

Engagements

Clients engage the Group's expertise for a wide range of projects that often focus on reducing the financial implications of storing information within the accesibility boundaries defined by the organisation's processes. These implications include addressing capital investment costs, day-to-day maintenance costs, real-estate (data centre) space costs as well as associated software licensing, server connectivity and management costs. Whether the costs can be identified as tangible, or contribute to better overall efficiency as intangible savings, the Group's independent approach ensures that Client's own agendas are paramount, unlike resellers or distributors of technology that are primarily interested in selling hardware, software and services.

In addition, to address financial implications, engagements also examine how technologies can meet the organisation's process and procedure demands. A "back to basics" approach is often facilitated to determine the true information dependency of the organisation. By defining the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for different classes of information used in the organisation, an appropriate hierarchical tiered architecture can be specified and solutions sought from vendors.[RPO-Point to recover date to. RTO-Time taken from failure to make data available.]

Deliverables

All projects are agreed between the Client and the Group in a formal engagement letter that detail the precise deliverables. Recent projects have included the following deliverables:

• Design and specification for consolidated, tiered data storage solution
• Invitation to Tender for Enterprise wide backup and recovery solution
• Report on utilisation of storage across the Enterprise
• Specification of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery enabling technologies
• Report into retention and deletion of business data in a regulated industry

Technologies

The Group has experience in designing solutions from a wide variety of vendors, including technologies such as RAID Arrays, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network Attach Storage (NAS), SCSI, iSCSI, Tape, and Robotic Tape Libraries; plus data management software for backup, recovery, archiving, lifecycle management, storage resource management (SRM), snapshots and replication.

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