Application Infrastructure
Business applications today are complex, process intensive, and storage demanding.  Users expect them to be connected to other systems and available at any time, wherever they are working, on multiple devices.  Regulatory compliance is driving data archiving, e-Discovery, and content archiving complexity as well.
 
Statera provides a comprehensive set of services that combines cross-functional knowledge of the application and of infrastructure to design and implement a holistic solution integrated into your data center environment.  This enables our clients to work with highly stable and performing applications with detailed visibility into the health and change of the environment as it is operated over time.
 

Planning

Statera designs infrastructure from the expectations and requirements that business users have of their application.  To do this, we:
  • Gather Service Level and Operations Requirements based on ITIL v3 terminology and concepts to get a complete picture of the application’s needs.
  • Identify scope, constraints, planning horizon, and other components to ensure we are building a solution that is right-sized for the client and their growth.
  • Use vendor and Statera proprietary calculators and tools to drive capacity, availability, and disaster planning.
  • Using this analysis information, we can then drive a complete design of the environment, including:
    • Server specifications, including physical hardware and virtualization
    • Network design to support the application and connectivity to other systems and management infrastructure
    • Application delivery design – load balancing, web application firewall, reverse proxy, security gateway, acceleration (caching and compression), and transport encryption
    • Storage from logical drive taxonomy and sizes to physical disk layout and RAID levels
    • Identity infrastructure (authentication, authorization, and access control; identity provisioning and control; permissions and entitlement management)
    • Redundancy design for High availability
    • Disaster recovery  and  backup/restore design
    • Business data archiving and control
    • Integration of operational monitoring systems and definition of KPIs for the application
    • Configuration and release management planning
    • Environment management planning

Implementation

Statera has expertise to implement application infrastructures for a variety of vendors and business applications, with specific focus on:
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • Microsoft SQL Server database (including clustering, mirroring, and log shipping deployments)
  • Microsoft SQL Server BI – Reporting services, Integration Services, and Analysis Services
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Microsoft BizTalk
  • Microsoft Project Server
  • Microsoft web applications (IIS and ASP.NET)
  • Java-based web applications (JSP/Servlet containers)
During the implementation, Statera works collaboratively with clients to build out the infrastructure and conduct informal knowledge transfer.  In addition, we create a detailed Run Book that shows every configuration detail and process step with screenshots so that the build out is documented and replicable.