Ensuring reliability among your most crucial applications

IT Infrastructure and you: why it matters

Disaster Recovery is necessary as a preventative measure to keep any problems from occurring. Most importantly, Legacy IT infrastructures are costly to implement and even costlier to maintain. Organizations whose core competences lay outside of IT are burdened with the ongoing maintenance of a heterogeneous collection of hardware and software applications that only becomes more unwieldy with time. As the infrastructure itself grows more complex, reliability tends to go down, and customers become less satisfied with the service they receive.

Hitting the stratosphere: going to the cloud

The term “cloud computing” has become something of a buzzword as of late, and it means different things to different people. For Ayoka and our clients, though, what it boils down to is this: we assist in moving large IT infrastructures deployed in-house to off-site locations with automated backup, virtualization, failover capabilities, and on-demand capacity. These managed services free organizations from having to incessantly worry about maintaining their growing IT infrastructure – which is, after all, a support function to their core competencies.

With Ayoka’s services, you may choose to move your entire application off-site, or only part of it. For example, you may choose to move to the cloud and replace your data storage solutions with something managed, like Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), or you may prefer to enhance your in-house disaster recovery capabilities. Whatever your need, we will cater to you.

What is virtualization, and why do I care?

A virtualized application is one that runs in a software emulation of a hardware server. That concept may seem somewhat dizzying, but the advantages are numerous. For instance, what if you could make a backup of your whole server and fire it up at another remote location, on demand? Virtualization allows you to do precisely that. With virtualization, you can achieve better performance and higher reliability at lower costs.

If your IT infrastructure is getting out of hand, call Ayoka for a consultation.

Disaster Recovery

Ayoka’s approach to disaster recovery is a proactive one rather than a reactionary one. We aim to stop problems from happening before they ever start. To this end, we recommend moving services to the cloud where possible, as well as implementing automated backup solutions and virtualized failover servers. To spot problems as they occur, we implement monitoring solutions such as Hyperic and Spiceworks. These tools automatically manage software and hardware inventory and allow operators to respond to problems in real time.

Advantage of the cloud: reliability

Services like Windows Azure and Amazon’s EC2 and S3 are extremely reliable. Have you ever known amazon.com to go down for any length of time? How would you like to have your application hosted on the same servers as Amazon’s? Amazon’s cloud computing services allow you to do just that, and Ayoka can help you get there.

Traditional backup solutions

For some clients, moving services to the cloud is not feasible for a variety of reasons. For these clients, Ayoka offers a number of automated backup and monitoring solutions including:

  • Database backup for SQL Server, Oracle, DB/2, MySQL, and others.
  • Creation of backup servers, either co-hosted or located elsewhere.
  • Application auditing for bugs that cause downtime.
  • … and much more.

The bottom line

Application downtime incurs billions of dollars in lost revenue every fiscal year. Don’t wait until your application has a heart attack; practice preventive care and call Ayoka today.