Technical Operations are our bread and butter. We have tempered experience running small-to-mid scale operations with machine-to-staff ratios in excess of 100-to-1. We are committed to researching and following Best Practices. We find that judicial use of Policy and Procedure is vital for long-term success. Our experience in Service Delivery and Service Support has shown us that building a culture of service with your operations team is imperative for continued success.

• Best Practices - Are you trying to do something that has been done before? If so, your time may be better spent figuring out what the industry standard is rather than creating a new solution. Research first, and act when you have information on what solutions are available.

• Policy and Procedure - We like to run operations by the book ... but we find that it helps to keep the book as concise as possible. Keep your policies readable and available - contact us for some simple examples. Routine procedures are fundamental to perpetual operations, and procedures should be rigorously automated and tuned on a continuous basis.

• Service Delivery and Service Support - Stay focused on the big picture. Your operations team should have the goal of delivering the service in an expedient manner and providing for its ongoing operation at the forefront of their decision making process - sometimes it can be tempting to get fixated on the details of a particular aspect of an implementation.

We can help you determine the appropriate allocation of resources for your technical infrastructure. Read below for specific skills, applications, and hardware that we have experience with:

• The Basics - Email, Network, Connectivity, Telephone, Storage, Backups, Network Security, Physical Security, Build-out, Office Moves, Colocation, Hiring, Training
• Advanced Topics - Budget Preparation, Contract Review, System Analysis, System Design, System Documentation, Corporate Policy, Source, Build, Test and Release Management, Quality Assurance, Debugging, Cluster Management and Monitoring, NfsRoot, Log Analysis, Incident Response, Capacity Planning, Performance Analysis, High Availability, Statistical Analysis, Field-Replaceable Unit-based Architectures, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Custom Linux Distributions, Embedded Systems
• Hardware - IBM Blade Center, Fibre Channel SAN, NetApp NAS, Cisco
• Operating Systems - Linux (Debian, Red Hat), Solaris, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
• Databases - IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL
• Other Servers and Applications - Apache, Qmail, BitKeeper, CryptoCard, VMWare

We also have a deep understanding of SNMP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, NIS, NFS, RPC, SMB/CIFS, SSH, PXE, TFTP, and WebDAV, among other protocols.