Systems Management

Capacity management

Adapt provides capacity management and planning services for Managed Services customers. Monitoring the servers, storage and networks in our care, we capture and store resource utilisation data across your infrastructure. Working with you, Adapt compares these results to a hands-on impression of your systems, measuring against anticipated operational peaks and planned changes.

Capacity and change

Adapt works to understand the likely effect that changes to your business will have upon infrastructure. Utilising live and stored data, we help you model potential impact on your storage, network and server environment, comparing projected utilisation against real-world peak capacity.

Based on the outcome of this exercise, our technical specialists recommend upgrades, configuration improvements and design refinements that will accommodate your planned change most cost-effectively.

Capacity and operational peak

Adapt monitors your infrastructure and alerts you to high utilisation in peak operational periods, which may occur as a result of seasonal variation in custom or simply regular monthly activity. Adapt sets utilisation thresholds for key indicators such as available disk space, CPU usage, storage and network IO.

We provide you with the detail of actual usage over time to help you accurately predict future project load. Collaboratively, we can perform what if analysis to see where potential bottlenecks are likely to appear.

Patch management

Patch management is a proactive service that coordinates and executes maintenance tasks in your computing environment to prevent unexpected downtime of infrastructure resources.

For UNIX systems

Adapt identifies and obtains UNIX software patches and maintenance level fixes. We analyse all system issues to guard against future failure and discuss software patch recommendations with you during your regular account reviews.

For MS Windows Server

Adapt monitors Microsoft security bulletins and other industry sources as a matter of course. Following a Microsoft announcement, Adapt will advise you of available patches and recommend those applicable to your infrastructure.

Depending on the agreement in place, Adapt will then deploy patches in line with agreed methodology, typically starting with any test or development environments.

Performance management

Adapt offers a range of performance management solutions for our network, storage, virtualisation and application offerings.

Profiling

We profile the behaviour of your disk subsystems, network transit traffic, inter data centre traffic, ESX hosts, virtual machines, physical servers running a variety of operating systems and key applications such as Microsoft SQL Server.

Optimisation

Once a system has been profiled, Adapt will analyse available optimisation strategies that best reflect your business drivers. Optimisation may be required for a number of reasons, including changes in load due to seasonal demand, performance degradation, upgrades to software or as part of a continuous improvement cycle.

Analysis is always carried out under strict control and results are benchmarked to provide context. Over the lifetime of a contract, Adapt works with you through a series of performance management cycles to create and maintain an optimal service.

High availability and clustering

Adapt data centre, network, server and storage offerings all entail high availability options to increase levels of resiliency including:

Network connectivity and devices

We provide multiple redundant circuits for data centre interconnectivity and use multiple transit partners to deliver resilient Internet access. Network devices such as firewalls, routers, switches and load balancers are supplied as clustered pairs to remove any single points of failure.

Data centre connectivity

Our highly resilient dark fibre loop enables us to provide services that span two or more data centres, ensuring that even the loss of an entire data centre would have no impact upon your business. Using advanced routing protocols, Internet delivered services would also continue to function normally.

Disk storage

Adapt storage services use multiple controllers to safeguard against hardware failure or misconfiguration. The disk within the storage is presented using RAID, allowing for the complete failure of multiple disks or enclosures.

For even greater levels of availability, Adapt’s virtual disk offering spans two data centres. In the event of a lost data centre, the disk continues to be presented from the second site by synchronously replicating data between data centres across highly resilient Adapt dark fibre links.

Server virtualisation

High performance virtual servers deliver services across multiple physical hosts and, if required, across multiple physical data centres.

Physical servers

Adapt manages Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms for increased resilience and uptime of your business-critical systems.