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Brains2Bytes Large Systems Administration ExperiencesWe have expertise in building and maintaining large numbers of machines in data center environments and for large scale desktop deployments. Typically, organizations use a combination of media, cloning, jumpstarts, kickstarts and ad-hoc scripting for their building efforts, and a combination of NIS, NFS, cron and rsync utilities for the configuration environment. Although this method of managing machines is widespread, it is far from ideal. The lack of an overall system architecture, automated build procedures and centralized configuration management makes growth or change extremely painful at these organizations.Part of the problem is that administrators have the dual role of planning for growth, and maintain service levels within the existing infrastructure. What typically happens is that the infrastructure gets more and more fragile, glued together by countless scripts, mostly for disjointed functions. There is a marked absence of rigorous scientific approaches to infrastructure buildouts, which leads to unnecessary costs to your company over the long term. The most common approach towards streamlining is the centralized services approach, which is usually cost-effective. But often the corporate structure of the company, with uncooperating departments, is a problem. Approaches combining centralized services and localized administrator help often work better, depending upon the circumstances. The field of system administration is evolving rapidly into a mature discipline that trades these types of ad-hoc management procedures for well designed architectures that allow for easier maintenance and growth of large-scale installations. Our engineers can help you streamline the design of configuring and maintaining sanity of such systems, and prevent the turmoil that occur when different machine types get added later to your network. To get a good observation of large scale administration techniques and associated issues, please check out this paper Brains2Bytes Monitoring ExperiencesWe're expert designers of monitoring solutions for systems and network infrastructure. Whether you have a single site with 10 servers or a geographically dispersed Enterprise, we've probably seen your monitoring problems before. We can help you design monitoring solutions from scratch or fill in gaps in your existing monitoring infrastructure.Monitoring can involve from very simple to very complex solutions, and can cost you anything upto a few hundred thousand dollars. Common criteria driving costs include scalability ond reliability of the solution, configuration flexibility, notification mechanisms, event correlation mechanisms, adherence to open standards, tracking historical trends, and external service level agreements. In our opinion, you could get a lot of sophistication in your network monitoring package without having to spend a lot of money. Most sites can get by with one of the excellent Open Source monitoring solutions that are available coupled with some custom site scripting. For the truly large enterprise or sites with specialized needs, there are also comprehensive proprietary monitoring solutions available. A monitoring solution solves only the problem detection part of the puzzle, but not the problem solving part. The commercial products such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli attempt to handle the latter, though with very limited scope and success. We support Nagios, an open source monitoring product, that comes close to providing the functionality provided by the expensive, proprietary products. Brains2Bytes Vendor Lock-in PreventionThis is one of the pet peeves of most Operations Managers all the way up to the CIO. Once you start using proprietory software, you are essentially locked in, and at the mercy of the vendor's annual maintenance fees. Where we can help is to plan with you a solution where you reduce your dependence on such products by integrating open-source software into your environment. Our method for this is three-tiered 1) If there is a robust, secure open-source product available for the task at hand, we try to use it. 2) If there is no viable open source product, we try to choice vendor products that adhere to open standards. 3) If neither of the above is available, then we choose solutions based on product capabilities and our past experiences with the vendor.One obvious example is the introduction of Linux as the desktop environment, but examples abound - let us help you install PostgresSQL and reduce your dependence on Oracle or Sybase, Nagios to complement Tivoli or Openview, or sendmail to replace Microsoft Outlook. Even if your company relies on proprietory software for its core operations, you may be better off if we build a prototype equivalent, open source (or open standards) solution for you. Not only do you get the chance to experiment with the new system, chances are that the extra negotiating leverage you could get with your vendor would be well worth the cost. Brains2Bytes Security ExperiencesWe would like to emphasize that security is not a separate product, it encompasses every facet of the work we do for you. If you are in a situation where your internet operations are running successfully, but you worry about the consequences of a break-in into your site, we would be of asistance in the following areas:- Determine the 'gateways' into your system - Scan your network for vulnerabilities - Implement Intrusion Detection Systems in your environment - Install commercial or linux firewalls - harden your systems with patches and upgrades - Analysis of daily system log files - Perform computer forensics in case a system is suspected to be compromised The entire field of security exploits and its defenses is unique, in that it is analogous to the cold war. One side is ahead until the other catches up. Staying abreast of current developments, latest vulnerabilities and their prevention can be difficult, given that you have a business to run. Large vendors will play on your security fears, and try to charge you enormous sums to set up their systems. We can provide you with an independent evaluation of specific security products, represent your company to security product vendors and install/configure commercial security solutions for you. We can also tell you what open source alternatives are out there and give you unbiased information about their strengths/weaknesses. By periodically scheduling the services listed above, we can help you keep your site safe and secure, at all times. Brains2Bytes Linux Migration ServiceThe savings obtained by moving your corporate environment to the open-source Linux environment is enormous. In most cases, you could use all the old Wintel boxes as adequate linux desktops. At the risk of perhaps losing a small handful of specialized applications, you get the following benefits- zero software licensing costs. Due to the loose coupling of various components under Linux, you could deploy applications from a failed machine onto another machine without licensing problems. - significantly reduced number of patches and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, unlike Windows service packs, linux patches usually don't require application reconfiguration. - The centralized server model makes software backups much simpler, since only one machine needs attention. Linux desktops greatly simplify application deployment as well. Often, Installing a new software version or patch requires only that it be installed on the server and the server config changed to point clients to the updated software. With this method, new applications and patches can be rolled out instantly to hundreds of machines. Also important, If a problem is discovered, these changes can be rolled back nearly instantaneously as well. - Linux will not force you to upgrade your hardware every few years to cater to newer versions of your Operating System. - You can choose your own Windowing environment, and are not limited to what the vendor decides you 'should' be using. What we recommend is that you spend time analyzing and categorizing software in what you cannot live without and what are nice-to-have. Once you have the set, we could help you design and configure equivalent systems using the open-source platform. In fact, other than Microsoft Visio and the Quicken money-management software, this author cannot think of important programs absent on the Linux environment. Attached below is a table denoting the most common software we find in a typical Windows environment, and the open-source replacement we could help you configure until you are completely migrated.
Brains2Bytes Open-Source Application SupportThis is an understandable concern for most managers.If the open-source software is widely used, we have found that support for it is significantly better than comparable proprietory ones. The source code is freely available, and programmers take pride in correcting faulty logic and 'contributing' to the cause. Usually, a fix is available within 24 hours. In commercial software, you would pay enormous amounts to get comparable levels of support. In fact, if companies like you switch to open-source software, the vendor selling proprietory software might find itself unprofitable, and drop (or reduce) support for its product. We would argue that open-source fosters a "natural selection" of software, eliminating poor quality and the dependency on proprietory vendors. Yes, you say, but where is my 800 number to call? Brains2Bytes will support your infrastructure. If we can't fix the problem, we will go out to the open-source community and most likely, get a fix within a few hours. If we have to, we will contact the original authors of the software. We will also notify the authors of the fix, which will get integrated into their source tree, if they approve of it. That way, you and everyone else, will get improved software during the next release. In the unlikely event the author(s) got run over by a bus, and the open-source community found an irresistible newer version of 'Doom', and is ignoring our cries for help, what then? You can always offer money for a fix after which hordes of hungry programmers will rush to you with one. Seriously, most open-source authors would be overjoyed if a company offered to sponsor modifications or patches to their program. Still not convinced? As early as 1997, the Infoworld Best Technical Support Award went to the Linux User community. Finally, for your own independent research, a detailed study linking reports of several studies, can be found here |