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.