Corporate Technologies’ professional services organization provides a full range of storage solutions that address the complete spectrum of storage issues—from business continuity through storage management—using our four-phase engagement model.

Architect
Before we design any storage solution, we develop the optimum storage blueprint that will satisfy each customer’s particular needs. We fully analyze business requirements, taking into account both application and industry requirements, so you can be sure any storage solution recommended is a perfect match to your needs.

For example, if your business is transaction- or compute-intensive—as is often the case in financial services firms or research organizations—we would consider SAN technology, which is both fast and reliable. On the other hand, if you are a global enterprise with multiple locations, we would probably suggest locating storage at one site and replicating it to a second. If data loss is extremely critical—and the loss would likely result in a significant cost liability—we might very well recommend a snapshot storage strategy to guarantee no loss of essential data.

Corporate Technologies also takes your existing IT infrastructure into account. We audit your current systems and storage to leverage and optimize what you already have in place. Today, many server platforms connect to shared storage. We understand UNIX, Windows, Linux and mainframe operating systems and how to make them communicate with different storage devices. Further, we know how to complement your existing storage assets with additional storage capacity that optimizes your ability to support different applications while not over-provisioning.

Our professional services team takes a holistic view of your entire enterprise. So you get a storage infrastructure that is both state-of-the-art and one that takes into account the complexities of heterogeneous environments, administration, compliance, and network security.

Integrate
The architectural design phase of our best-practice storage solutions is just the beginning of Corporate Technologies’ professional services. Before we integrate a new solution into your production environment, we bring all the components of your storage solution—SAN, NAS, and any others— together in our unique Interoperability Lab to ensure all goals established in the architectural phase are met. Only then do we integrate the new storage solution into your existing infrastructure. To ensure that the integration goes smoothly, the engineers responsible for testing the solution in our Lab also who integrate the solution in the field.

Because we are sensitive to your data and business requirements, our integration always takes both into account. For a credit card processing company, for example, we designed a storage solution that both met demanding backup and restore times and had built-in scalability, acknowledging storage needs that were doubling annually, and avoiding future backup and restore problems.

Optimize
Corporate Technologies also optimizes your storage on several levels. If, like most firms, you have information with different levels of importance, we can show you how to optimize the cost, performance, and availability trade-offs using mirroring versus replication strategies.

If disaster recovery is essential, we can help you ensure that all data is captured and mission-critical data is available following an outage. Our professional engineers are expert at implementing replication strategies that allow tiered recovery that is directly aligned to data importance, from most to least critical.

We also ensure optimization of your storage solutions so they can be sustained—either by your IT group or our professional services. Because any storage solution we design incorporates best practices, we readily accommodate all your important upgrades.

Support
Corporate Technologies’ professional services team provides comprehensive support throughout the client engagement, from architecting a storage solution through optimization.

We are highly knowledgeable about how storage products work in a wide variety of heterogeneous production environments, and we can provide clients with advanced project management skills. Corporate Technologies routinely project-manages multimillion dollar engagements to ensure that our solutions meet agreed-to time, budget, and business requirements.

At the end of an engagement, we collaborate with our client’s IT staff to ensure full knowledge transfer, supported by excellent and comprehensive documentation. Post-engagement, we remain fully available on a consulting basis, whether to answer routine questions or advise on storage upgrades and updates.