Training
New to SAN or IP SAN technologies? Using NAS for the first time? Dealing with staff transitions and turnover leaving you with a loss of experience and expertise? Whatever the situation may be, we can work with you and your team to cover the nuts and bolts of storage technology. If you already have a solution in place, we can focus on the future and operation of your own solution for training purposes. Do you know what SOX requirements are for managing your data? Are you considering another type of storage solution, or disaster recovery solution? Are you thinking consolidation, or virtualization of your servers and storage? Are you thinking blades? Let us help you gain a real-world understanding of the storage technology, backup, servers and blades. Find out how to successfully implement these technologies into your environment, determines resource workloads, and how to measure the impact effectively. Learn about advanced features and functions that can help improve total cost-of-ownership when deploying these new approaches to infrastructure consolidation. Our goal is to increase your education without pitching products or training materials to help your IT department drive business success.

Remote Management

Our professional service includes fully-managed services for monitoring and managing your storage and backup environments. We combine advanced monitoring and reporting services with complete management and resolution capabilities to minimize the costs and resources needed to manage enterprise storage systems and storage assets. Whether you have a short term need, are in transition to another project, or no skills in house, with our guaranteed service levels, you can rapidly and cost-effectively gain control of your storage and backup environments, while enabling business to continue with confidence in your data management.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Our professional services include data recovery services and capabilities that are among the best in the industry today. By maintaining our own in-house test facility and lab space, we utilize the latest tools for data recovery, data repair, data forensics and data transfer services. Our state-of-the- art test equipment and clean room facilities provide the service you need when you need it. Our team can help you recover data from literally any type of media from external disk drives, storage arrays, networked storage and internal disks. We would also provide you with a firm quote and give you an exact timeframe for recovering your data.

Data Replication

There are many reasons why a simple backup would not be the only answer to your business continuity. We offer a unique, guaranteed, and simple plan to deploy data replication to our data center assuring you data availability at all times. Our technique is based on Asynchronous Replication which can occur in two ways. Customers can synchronize their full dataset over a WAN connection, where speeds are dependent on local bandwidth and/or the remote bandwidth tier guaranteed by our service contract. Large datasets, particularly those behind slow WAN connections can be synchronized via an on-site feeder appliance shipped to the customer. The feeder appliance is then returned to the our data center facility and synchronized. Further data changes between local and remote sites are replicated over the WAN. Once the local site has recreated the normal hardware configuration, restoration of data is performed as a reverse synchronization. This can be done either over a WAN link, where speeds are dependent on bandwidth tier and local bandwidth, or from a our recovery appliance shipped on-site.

Data Security and Protection

Our professional services team can work with your data expert to evaluate the existing encryption strategy and policy to make sure it is aligned with your business needs and industry security best practice. Based on your business process, our experts will provide appropriate security recommendations. This process will start by assessments; DNFG engineers will work with your team to collect detailed asset information on your organization’s hardware and software environment, sensitive data, and current security policy management sets. Information collected will include hardware-specific data such as model numbers, firmware, and driver levels, as well as applications, data types, and usage. Combined with your corporate objectives, our team will determine the business objectives for encrypting data-at-rest. From these objectives, we will derive a plan and proposal to address the policies, architecture and scope of the project.

Data Migration

Our Professional Services team is available to help you migrate your data from one environment to another in the shortest amount of time. A highly qualified consulting engineer will guide your organization through the migration process with the least amount of disruption to your end-users and your overall business environment. Our service professionals can help design and optimize the electronic movement of data from one location to another. Each migration is unique and requires a comprehensive migration plan. Key considerations include available migration strategies, migration issues, data criticality and migration methodology. DNF OADIM methodology uses best industry practices for risk mitigation and data integrity – before, during and after the migration.

Performance and Reliability Testing

Do you need to validate a concept, application, or test the response time and/or performance of your application or new hardware, but don’t have the proper lab hardware or storage independent of your production environment? Do you need the storage and server virtualization expertise to expedite your project? Our professional service team can help. Our team of experts will help you get the best possible performance from your existing servers and storage by making suggestions on ways to tune the system for best performance. We also have the tools, hardware and facility for installing your applications and hardware to work with you to improve resource utilization of your servers/storage, and recommending ways to improve performance.

VMware Consulting and Installation

We are a VMware Alliance Partner and have certified VMware engineers on our team to help you with VMware Server and ESX Server design, implementation and configuration. Migrating to a VMware environment can be a frightening experience to get started. Deploying it involves embracing and accepting the concept of “Virtualization”, and can be quite difficult until you’ve had some exposure with virtual machines. Our team can help you accelerate and jump start your deployment and migration plan.

Storage and Server Consolidation

Our professional team will help you sort through and understand the hottest topics in IT, including storage and server consolidation. What it means to your business and more importantly, whether it will provide a lower cost of ownership in the end. We will help you identify and deploy the right technology for your environment. We will team up with your staff to validate and understand the factors that contribute to the cost of maintaining servers and storage, and how they are affected by consolidating those resources.

Requirement Review and Assessment

Our expert engineers and project managers will work closely with your team for a comprehensive evaluation of your existing environment to come up with a documented plan and effective strategy and solution that will meet your business requirements, budgets and redundancy needs. Our professional team will provide you with a detailed project plan including resources and tasks, along with quantifiable deliverables and a time line for communication with the rest of your organization.

Installation and Configuration

Whether you need help setting up your new storage solutions, SAN fabrics, RAID arrays, network attached storage , network setup or just expand your existing storage array, we are here to help. Our engineers can help with all types of storage device installation and configuration including virtual tape libraries, disk-to-disk backup applications, and clustered storage systems. We will work with you to allocate space strategically and forecast future needs for initial setup and configuration of your storage.

Observation Process
A dedicated DNF Project Manager will spend initial discussions learning about your organization, its environment, available resources, core concerns and challenges. The Project Manager will engage your IT and operations department to ensure our team has a strong understanding of your current infrastructure and project deliverables.

Assessment Process

After compiling a detailed architecture assessment, the DNF Project Manager will work with our engineering team to create an in-depth assessment of your environment, your challenges and goals, to take stock of the current infrastructure, and recommend the next steps for a new project.

Design Process

The Project Team will develop a strategic plan comprised of testing, design and development engineers. This plan will address your core concerns and our recommendations to optimize your environment to improve your IT operations and business operations.

Implementation Process

Once the project design is approved by your team and ours, we can begin to implement the project design. The implementation phase may include new systems integration, redesigning the current setup for increased performance, utilization or efficient management.

Maintenance Process

After the implementation of the optimized infrastructure, the DNF Services group can continue on in a formal or as needed basis to monitor and maintain the redesigned infrastructure via remote management, periodic reassessments or optimization planning. Our goal is to continue to serve as a virtual IT team resource – to ensure our solution meets your current needs and to continue to meet future needs and concerns.

Have a DNF Security specialist contact you! Or call 510.265.1122