Storage Solutions

The best systems and storage solutions begin with an expert assessment of your business needs and environment. Lauren will conduct a thorough business impact analysis to properly scale the storage requirements for each of your major business applications. This analysis will then be used to provide an objective base and business case to determine the appropriate investment necessary to achieve an optimal storage solution.
Lauren offers a full range of Storage solutions for your organization, from industry-leading storage companies including IBM, HP and Veritas. The suite of storage services include.

Backup Architecture and Implementation

Electronic data is probably among your company's most valuable assets - so protecting and archiving that data is one of IT's most important tasks, and often, one of their biggest challenges.
Lauren specializes in assessing, designing and deploying enterprise-class backup and recovery systems for a wide variety of applications and environments, while keeping in mind your recovery-time and recovery-point objectives.

Backup and recovery solutions:

Unix, Linux and Windows server platforms
Network Attached Storage (NAS) filers
Databases - Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, others
Email - Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, SMTP/standards-based

"Server-less" SAN-based backup
Tape, Disk, Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) backup architectures
Tape, Disk, Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) backup architectures
Tape Library, Nearline Disk, and Offsite Tape Vaulting solutions
Assess and upgrade existing backup systems

Our factory-trained and certified engineers are current with the latest technologies and products, and use field-proven "Best Practices" to design and deploy "best-of-breed" solutions to fit your exact requirements and budget from HP, IBM, Tivoli and Veritas

High Availability Clustering

To achieve near-zero downtime, mission-critical systems cannot afford to have single points of failure in servers, storage or interconnects. High-availability (HA) is now a necessity in most modern IT systems. HA is most effectively achieved in server and storage systems through server clustering, which allows systems to survive hardware or software failures without users experiencing downtime.

Lauren specializes in designing, deploying and supporting clustered HA systems for a variety of applications and environments. Some of the supported clustering environments are listed below:

Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) for Exchange, SQL Server and Windows Server clusters
Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) for Unix, Linux and Windows applications
Oracle Real Applications Clusters (RAC) for HA Oracle database applications

Lauren can assess your HA needs then design, integrate, test and support a single or multi-vendor clustering solution.

Our factory-trained and certified engineers are current with the latest clustering technologies and products, and use field-proven "Best Practices" to design and deploy "best-of-breed" solutions to fit your exact requirements and budget.

Our Enterprise Software team includes Oracle and MS SQL certified DBAs so that we can provide you with full, top-to-bottom assistance with your Oracle clustering project.

Email and File Archival

Archiving and managing email messages and file-based data has become a significant need for many organizations. This is especially true for public companies whose email and file retention/destruction polices are affected by the compliance and other legislation requirements.

Lauren can help you assess your email and file archiving needs and provide a complete in-house or managed/hosted solution based on VERITAS Enterprise Vault technology.

Whether your company is subject to legislated compliancy or not, you can benefit from an archiving solution from Lauren:

Lifetime Management of Information:
Automatically manage email or other content lifecycle from cradle to grave. Protect corporate intellectual property, retain access and enable rapid discovery of content based on corporate defined policies.

Reduce Cost of Content Retrieval, Recovery and Administration:
Save time and money spent retrieving and recovering old or lost email or other content. Provide immediate recovery of key individual mailboxes and information stores.

Easy End-user Access and Comprehensive Search Functionality:
Seamless integration with Outlook, Exchange and other frontline systems for quick and easy search and retrieval of archived items. Shortcuts and web-based search functions keep users instantly in touch with all email and content

Optimize Storage and Utilize Cost-effective Options:
Reduce message/information store by 50% or more. Supports any Windows NTFS compliant storage solution including magnetic or optical disks, Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS). Single-instance storage of identical items is maintained.

Compliance and Discovery:
Enterprise Vault offers highly efficient, secure solutions for organizations required to produce discovery of content in response to litigation or a similar event (Discovery Accelerator) and regulatory supervision in-line with finance regulations (Compliance Accelerator).
An archiving solution based in VERITAS Enterprise Vault supports Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino (Windows only), SMTP email, Microsoft SharePoint, and file-based data, for any application that stores data in standard "flat" files.

Assessment

Our customized assessments ensure that we provide we provide you the required elements for building a successful messaging structure. The elements include Active Directory readiness, Email policies, Archiving strategies, Spam & Virus controls, Mobile access, Mailbox & Log storage allocation, Authentication controls, and OS configuration. Analysis & Recommendations

We offer Lotus and Microsoft "Best Practice" recommendations when architecting our solutions and designing our subsequent health check and periodic audit plans.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Solutions

Is your business really prepared for the worst? What would happen if your IT infrastructure is affected by malicious attacks, or is brought down by a natural disaster?
Power breakdowns and man made and natural disasters strike when you least expect it, serving as a reminder that in less than a moment's notice volumes of data can be lost.

Disaster Recovery, once only for large corporations, is now a necessity for businesses of all sizes What's crucial to keeping your business in business?

Uptime requirements for business critical IT functions
Industry compliance requirements
Lower cost Disaster Recovery technology
Less complex Disaster Recovery design options
Increased dependency on IT for business operations

Keeping in mind the imperative requirement of businesses today which need to be operating in a 24/7 mode without disruptions, Lauren's infrastructure services team architects replication strategies that suit all budgets.
Beginning with the humble tape backup technology from IBM or HP to complex disaster management solutions involving storage systems and snapshot replication software from HP Storage works, Symantec or Tivoli Storage Management, we can architect solutions that provide smooth failover for enterprise or mid-range customers.