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Three things your Solaris service provider must offer

How do you know if a potential Solaris service provider is right for you? Here are three things your ideal partner must provide.

Solaris System Administration

Day-to-day Solaris activities can be resource intensive, taking your engineers away from the strategic projects that will help your business grow. With a Solaris system administration service, you will be able to outsource many of these common tasks to a suitably qualified partner.

Your service provider should take care of activities like server administration, network management, dynamic tracing (DTrace) and debugging to troubleshoot problems in real-time. They should also be available to assist in an emergency, helping you to initiate your disaster recovery plan to accelerate your response and limit the impact on your IT services.

Effective administration should also be proactive, auditing and hardening security for instance. Similarly, planning software installation and storage allocations will ensure you have the resources required to meet demand now and in the future. Your partner’s expertise will help you better understand and plan budgets and resources to deliver the greatest return on investment and control costs.

Solaris Performance-Tuning

As a mission-critical platform, you need to be sure that your Solaris environment is fully optimised for performance and security. Using their experience and knowledge, your partner should be able to suggest potential improvements – and implement them too.

Potential opportunities for performance-tuning include network optimisation, Solaris virtualised performance and Sun clustering. In addition to optimising Solaris itself, your partner should also be able to assist with secondary factors, like network protocols and VLAN configuration to accelerate information flow.

Solaris System Patching

Although essential, installing patches and updates always present a risk to your system. Your ideal Solaris service partner will not only apply Oracle best-practice but will also provide the necessary skills and resources to assist with the full project lifecycle.

Your partner should assist with pre-patch planning, and risk analysis as well as assisting with the actual upgrade patching process. They will also advise about potential knock-on effects to other applications and services that may occur following Solaris update – and how to mitigate them.

In this way you can be sure that every patch is applied as smoothly as possible to reduce disruption and create secondary issues.

Conclusion

As you can see, your ideal partner must be deeply experienced with skills that cover every aspect of Solaris administration and support. Here at WTL we offer all these Solaris capabilities – and much more.

To discover how we can help your business get the most from your Solaris environment, please give us a call.

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Break-Fix vs Managed Services – Which is right for you?

When it comes to IT support services, there are two main choices – Break-Fix or Managed Services. So how do you choose which is right for your business?

What are Break-Fix IT services?

Break-Fix – when something breaks, you contact an IT support provider to fix it. Under this type of agreement, your supplier only gets involved when something goes wrong – the rest of the time you retain responsibility for keeping your IT systems running.

What are Managed Services?

Managed Services are much more hands-on; your provider assumes day-to-day responsibility for keeping your systems, applications and databases running. This means that they are always working to optimise your systems, not just when something breaks.

Which is the smartest choice for my business?

It is important to acknowledge that break-fix services tend to be cheaper, but there’s a good reason for this. Because you only contact your support provider when you have a major problem, they do not have to dedicate as much time and resources to your account, allowing them to reduce their overheads. However, a break-fix provider will also charge extra for anything that falls outside the scope of the contract, such as applying software updates or optimising databases.

An IT-managed services provider (MSP) is proactive, working to optimise your systems for maximum uptime and performance. Their efforts help to reduce the chances of something breaking in the first place. Although the headline charge for an MSP contract may seem higher, once the cost of downtime (or lack of it) is considered, they offer greater value than a break-fix alternative.

Stop accepting downtime

Given the importance of IT to their operations, businesses simply cannot afford to have unscheduled downtime. An MSP monitors your IT environment, constantly on the lookout for warning signs of an imminent failure or poor system performance. Once a potential issue is identified, they can schedule the necessary remedial work before there is a catastrophic outage or impact on operations.

The proactive efforts of an MSP significantly reduce the risk of system downtime, making them a smarter strategic choice for all but the smallest of organizations.

It’s also important to note that MSPs do more than simply prevent system outages. By proactively optimising software and databases, they help to improve operational efficiency and maximise ROI from IT investments for instance. Similarly, by taking ownership of software patching, they can help to improve the overall security posture of your systems and data – vital for compliance and data protection requirements. A break-fix provider does not offer either of these benefits – unless you are willing to pay a premium on top of your standard agreement terms.

To learn more about our Solaris and Linux Managed Services  (and why break-fix services simply aren’t good enough for your business), please give us a call

 

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The 5 Key Benefits Of Solaris & Linux Managed Services

Outsourcing is a popular tactic used by large businesses to control costs and reduce their operational IT overheads. But what do they get from it? And can any organisation use Linux and Solaris managed services?

Here are five key benefits of outsourcing your Linux and Solaris management:

1. Optimised systems

As your processes become more reliant on data, speed of access is increasingly important. To ensure you have the right information whenever you need it, Linux and Solaris systems must be optimised for maximum performance.

Your IT team is probably tied up doing day-to-day activities; with managed services, your outsourcing partner can take proactive action to improve operations without adding to their workload.

2. Improved uptime and availability

The other benefit of Linux / Solaris optimisation will be improved uptime and availability. By identifying issues early, your managed services provider will be able to resolve them before they become critical or significantly affect operations.

3. Reduced costs

IT skills are in high demand – which makes them expensive. Sourcing, training and paying a skilled Solaris / Linux administrator will take a significant chunk out of your budget.

Using a managed service gives you access to all the skills you need to maintain and optimise your servers – but without the headaches of actually employing an expert yourself. This will help to significantly reduce your salary, training and tax bills.

4. Access to experts

These savings become exponential when you consider the range of specialisms required to manage a diverse Solaris / Linux environment. You have to consider servers, storage, networking, support, administration etc.

A managed service provider has their specialists, allowing them to deploy the right person for each task at a fraction of the cost of building your team in-house. This also ensures that you can rely on their comprehensive industry and technology knowledge to help you define a workable, future-ready IT strategy

5. Simplified administration

The IT environment is increasingly complex which has a knock-on effect on administration. Keeping all the various elements running optimally is a major drain on resources.

With a managed Solaris / Linux service you can outsource at least some of your admin operations to a more experienced partner. They can then streamline support and management processes for your benefit, freeing up internal resources for other tasks.

Historically managed services have only been an option for the largest businesses. But as technology improves, virtually any business running Linux or Solaris can afford to take advantage of managed services – and to realise all five of the benefits listed here.

To learn more about Linux and Solaris outsourcing – and exactly what it will do for your business – please give the WTL team a call.

Oracle Solaris Operating System

Why Oracle Solaris is the ideal operating system for your Oracle Database

The adoption of SaaS and subscription-based systems has helped many firms reduce costs by building vendor-agnostic best-of-breed solutions tailored to their specific operational needs. This development has certainly helped to increase IT flexibility, but it may have come at a cost to performance.

Yes, cloud-based platforms offer unrestricted growth and scalable resource assignment – but they are not typically tuned to the demands of specific workloads. Technologies like AI and IoT and 5G rely on real-time processing – the faster the better. With Oracle Solaris running your Oracle Database, you’ll have the agility to take advantage of these technological innovations. Benefiting from a flexible infrastructure that can easily scale as demand increases and allow you to set your own pace for moving to a multi-cloud environment.

So, as you plan for a more agile, faster future, it may be time to re-evaluate your Oracle set-up.

Operating systems still matter

Without an up-to-date, modern operating system, your infrastructure could be prone to system outages and potential data loss. Creating extra work for your IT team firefighting problems when they should be focusing on other business-critical tasks.

When using Oracle Database, it makes sense to use the full Oracle technology stack – including the Solaris operating system. Even before Oracle acquired Sun, resources were being allocated to ensure maximum performance from SPARC-based hardware running Solaris. The result of these efforts is several significant benefits:

Maximised hardware returns

The latest Solaris offers superior virtualisation functionality over generic alternatives. Oracle Solaris Containers are optimised for SPARC hardware, allowing you to operate several Solaris 11 virtual machines on a single physical server for maximum resource utilisation – and return on investment.

The Containers also offer a future for your legacy systems if required. Applications and workloads can be migrated onto the newest Solaris hardware to improve performance and increase resilience.

Granular OS analysis

Optimising code and application configurations help to provide a performance gain – as does tweaking the underlying operating system. But unlike most OSs, Solaris does away with the trial-and-error approach by delivering actionable insights direct to your systems administrators.

Oracle Solaris StatsStore automatically monitors the full technology stack, generating valuable performance statistics and isolating potential issues early. These granular insights dramatically shorten the troubleshooting process and can also be used to better direct your efforts to optimise the performance of your Oracle databases.

Automation goes beyond analysis too. Solaris ships with all the tools you need to manage the full software lifecycle – including a stack diagnosis facility. This automatically checks for software faults – including the database engine – and suggests potential fixes.

Improved security

Solaris 11 has been designed to boost security at every point of the IT lifecycle, from design to build, test and ongoing maintenance. The OS also offers a built-in framework to ensure that your database operations are fully logged to assist with proving compliance with security standards like PCI DSS and HIPAA.

Defence-in-depth technologies further protect your Oracle databases by preventing cybercriminals from attacking your systems. Without the ability to establish command and control, accessing data becomes almost impossible for unauthorised users.

Enhanced data management functionality

As well as being resilient, Solaris has been built to protect the integrity of your data. The native ZFS file system offers near-zero administration to reduce the burden on sysadmins and DBAs. Advanced file system and volume management capabilities give even greater control of your technology stack – and the overall performance of your Oracle databases.

Oracles Commitment to The Future

To reduce the complexities and cost of systems upgrades Oracle Solaris now follows a continues delivery model. So, since the launch of Oracle Solaris 11 customers no longer have to go through time-consuming upgrades to gain the latest features and capabilities. Instead, you get them as a simple update, included in your Solaris subscription. Which means less work for you, less disruption to your business, and constant reassurance that you have the latest features and security coverage.

Oracle are also committed to offering support for Solaris 11 until at least 2031 under Oracle Premier Support. And if you get Oracle Extended Support, you’re covered until 2034. This all means that you can count on the latest system enhancements for years to come, and your investment is fully protected.

WTL are Solaris and Linux specialist, with the skills and knowledge required to support customers’ heterogeneous environments, both on and off premises.

We offer a Solaris Heath Check that is designed identify and address configuration, updates, security, and performance problems you might be experiencing.

Ready to get more from your Oracle Databases with Oracle Solaris. Give us a call today.