Business Continuity Support and Service for
Small Business Networks:
Windows 2003 Clustered Server Solutions
(Note: Microsoft has terminated support for Windows Server 2003 and it is advisable to consider upgrading from this legacy OS to an up-to-date version of Windows Server. If your organization is considering moving up to Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2016, Progent can provide online and onsite Windows Server 2019 planning and configuration consulting services or Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery consulting to ensure your project finishes on time and within budget. In addition, Progent's Windows Server Failover Clustering Consultants can help you a configure and troubleshoot a high-availability clustering solution based on Microsoft's latest technology.
Even with typical fault tolerant feature found in high-end server hardware, such as redundant power supplies and mirrored or RAID 5 disk arrays, failed devices must be identified and replacement components must be procured and installed. These failures can bring down a server for hours, if not days. Furthermore, during regularly scheduled software maintenance functions, servers need to be rebooted or brought off-line for an extended period. For customers who need 100% uptime, the only solution is to deploy a clustered server configuration that provides fully redundant servers for a single application.
A server cluster is a group of independent computers that work together to provide a common set of services. Windows 2003 provides this high-availability solution with the Cluster service. If a cluster node (a computer in a cluster) fails, other nodes in the cluster assume the functions of the failed node. Server clustering is an essential piece of any fault-tolerant architecture, and making large investments in communication infrastructure redundancy without providing for server redundancy defeats the value of that investment.
Progent offers Windows 2003 Server consulting to help your company implement clustered server configurations that can potentially provide 100% uptime, even for normal maintenance functions. This high-availability is possible because a single server in a cluster can be brought off-line for maintenance work without affecting users. Clustering also allows IT personal to perform critical security updates during regular business hours without reducing user productivity.
Microsoft Windows 2003 Server offers mature clustering technology. This is the third major release of Microsoft clustering technology, which was first released in 1997. Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, present a single view of the server to users, applications, and the network and both versions of Windows Server 2003 support up to eight-node clusters. Failover clustering configurations can be built around Microsoft technologies for mission-critical and collaborative applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server file and print services.
Host Clustering with Microsoft Virtual Server
Virtual Server host clustering is a technique for enhancing the capability of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 with the server cluster support incorporated in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. By means of Virtual Server host clustering, your network can benefit from an array of services via a minimum number of actual hardware servers and, simultaneously, ensure the high availability of the provided services. In case one server requires scheduled or unscheduled downtime, another server can immediately take its place and begin supporting services. As a result, your clients experience minimal service disruption. Progent's Microsoft-certified network engineers have in-depth experience deploying and supporting Microsoft Virtual Server. For more information, refer to Consulting Services for Microsoft Virtual Server.
Server Clustering and Storage Area Networks
A storage area network (SAN) is a set of disks, tapes, and servers connected to a common infrastructure, or storage fabric, such as Fibre Channel. A SAN allows multiple servers to access a common pool of storage. This allows storage to be assigned dynamically from the pool whenever it is required. Storage on a given server can be increased or decreased as needed without complex reconfiguring or re-cabling of devices. SAN technology is a good way to build clusters where shared access to a data set is required. By deploying multiple clusters onto a single storage area network, all of the benefits of SAN technology can be brought to the cluster environment. Progent's Microsoft certified engineers can show you how to combine Microsoft's server cluster technology with storage area networking to make your network more fault tolerant and easier to manage.
Server Clustering with Microsoft Exchange
Messaging systems based on Microsoft Exchange are vital for many businesses. Unfortunately, this crucial function is vulnerable to component failure, power loss, operator errors, and natural disasters. By allowing the failover of resources, server clustering provides fault tolerance for an Exchange environment. Server clusters that use the Microsoft Cluster Service can maintain data integrity and provide failover support and high availability for mission-critical applications and services on your back-end servers, including messaging systems, databases, and file and print services.
This figure shows an example of a four-node Exchange cluster with three active nodes and a passive standby node:
Progent's Microsoft-certified Exchange experts have proven, world-class skills in designing high-availability Exchange environments and can show you how to configure an Exchange Server cluster with shared data access to data and automatic failover capabilities. For details about Exchange consulting services available from Progent, visit Microsoft Exchange Consulting Support.
Other Zero-Downtime Solutions Provided by Progent's Consultants
Progent's certified support professionals can help your company to create an efficient, non-stop information network that resolves key problems encompassing a wide range of infrastructure technologies and processes including:
Disaster Recovery Planning
Progent's disaster recovery planning engineers can help you design a workplace recovery strategy that will allow you to resume network operations in case of an information system catastrophe. Progent can help you to define a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that includes periodic disaster recovery assessments and drills. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified professionals can also help you build an affordable, fault-tolerant system solution that takes into account availability issues covering a broad range of network technologies and procedures. To read more, go to Business Continuity Consulting.
Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services
ProSight Data Protection Services offer small and mid-sized organizations a low cost end-to-end service for reliable backup/disaster recovery (BDR). Available at a fixed monthly cost, ProSight DPS automates your backup activities and enables fast restoration of critical data, applications and VMs that have become unavailable or corrupted due to hardware failures, software glitches, natural disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, plus Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware images/. Critical data can be protected on the cloud, to a local device, or mirrored to both. Progent's cloud backup specialists can provide world-class expertise to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to be compliant with regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FIRPA, and PCI and, whenever necessary, can help you to recover your business-critical information. Find out more about ProSight DPS Managed Backup.
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 High Availability Failover Clustering
Windows Server 2019 features important improvements in capacity, throughput, manageability, security and compliance, app compatibility, Linux co-existence, Kubernetes networking, and hybrid combinations of on-premises and cloud-hosted resources. Headline new features of Microsoft Windows Server 2019 are Windows Admin Center for centralizing the management of hybrid local/cloud resources, System Insights for taking advantage of modern predictive analytics to control local networks, Windows Defender ATP Exploit Guard for host-intrusion defense, container orchestration using Kubernetes, Cluster Sets technology for deploying and managing massive high-availability scale-out clusters, and Storage Migration Service for simplifying the migration from legacy versions of Windows Server. For details, go to Microsoft Windows Server 2019 High Availability Failover Clustering Help.
Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery/business continuity experts can assist your organization to plan and deploy a DR system based on Microsoft's latest Failover Clustering technologies including Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade for non-disruptive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for zero-data-loss Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Storage Spaces Direct for high-performance storage clusters using low-cost hardware, Virtual Machine Load Balancing for enhancing the performance and resilience of Failover Clusters while reducing TCO and operational expenses, and Cloud Witness for fast, affordable creation of a failover cluster quorum arbitration point. For more information, see Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Support.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced world-class fault tolerance and recoverability to Microsoft's clustering solution. Windows Server 2012 R2 builds on this foundation and delivers significant improvements offering more extensibility, non-stop disk storage uptime for server applications, streamlined administration, faster automatic failover, and additional flexibility for designing clusters. To learn more, see Windows Server 2012 Clustering Integration.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Disaster Recovery Solutions
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is an extension to VMware vCenter that lets you specify, automate and verify a repeatable process for restoring services quickly following an outage. SRM supports centrally controlled and automated recovery, application mobility, and non-disruptive site relocation, failback and re-protect. SRM also allows non-intrusive testing for disaster recovery, upgrades and fixes and can generate reports to confirm complete service recovery, validate SLAs and demonstrate compliance. Progent can provide the skills of a VCDX certified VMware SRM consulting expert to help you to plan, deploy, test and administer a DR solution based on VMware Site Recovery Manager.
NetApp MetroCluster Disaster Recovery Software
NetApp MetroCluster is a disaster recovery software suite that uses failover storage clustering along with replication to provide fast, zero data loss disaster recovery (DR) between datacenters that are as far as 185 miles apart. Progent offers online or on-premises access to a NetApp MetroCluster expert who can help you to design, configure, administer, upgrade, test and repair a disaster recovery solution based on NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can help you to select a topology for your MetroCluster environment that meets your functional needs and IT budget. Progent can make sure you adhere to best practices for configuring your MetroCluster environment by providing guidance with tasks like assigning shelf IDs, arranging aggregate layout, setting up volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, provisioning Cisco and Brocade switches, designing a tiebreaker, designing a TCP/IP configuration replication network between your peered clusters, and verifying your disaster recovery solution to verify compliance with information assurance standards and regulatory requirements.
Network Load Balancing
Progent offers fault tolerant load balancing support covering network load balancing, load balanced programs, LAN/WAN infrastructure routing, and content dispatching technology such as F5 Networks 3DNS. Fault tolerant load balancing solutions for which Progent can provide consulting expertise include Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Metaframe and Presentation Server, Cisco CSS, Cisco Content Distribution Manager and ACNS, and F5 Networks BIG-IP. For more information, visit High Availability Load Balancing.
Zero Downtime Data Centers
Progent's Data Center professionals can show you how to find zero-downtime data centers that match the specific requirements of your business. High availability off-site data centers are particularly attractive to small and mid-size companies due to of their affordability and convenience compared to taking a do-it-yourself approach. Trying to design an on-site data center that offers even a minimum level of fault tolerance is too expensive for most small businesses. Progent is ready to help you get all the advantages of high-availability colocation centers by offering a complete array of engineering and support services. To read more, see High-Availability Data Centers Consulting.
High-Availability Inter-office Networking
Progent’s multi-site network infrastructure consultants can help organizations achieve fault tolerant inter-site connectivity solutions by means of redundant networks with transparent failover. Progent’s Cisco-premier CCIE network engineers can design and implement high-availability Inter-office connections supported by fault tolerant EIGRP routers or non-stop OSPF configurations of Cisco routers. Progent can demonstrate how multi-path connectivity and transparent fail-over offers affordable 24x7 interoffice networking. For more information, see 24x7 Inter-office Connectivity.
Non-stop Internet Connectivity
Progent's Cisco-authorized network consultants can show you how to design an economical, fault tolerant Internet configuration architecture that can achieve 24x7 Internet access through a broad array of fault tolerant Internet access solutions including fault tolerant BGP, automatic fail-over, and multiple Internet Service Providers. Progent offers Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert professionals to show you how to utilize the most up-to-date technology for fault tolerant Internet access to create an affordable, fully redundant Internet interface with automatic failover and other capabilities to deliver non-stop Internet connections. For details, visit High Availability Internet Connectivity Architecture.
Backup and Restore Solutions Consulting and Support Services
Progent can provide affordable online access to IT engineers with expertise in a broad range of products and technologies that deliver solutions for protecting Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux physical and virtual servers and workstations as well as laptops and smartphones. Progent offers consulting support for all major backup products such as Acronis, Symantec Backup Exec, BackupAssist, HP Data Protector, Double-Take, Mozy, Retrospect for Macintosh, Time Machine, VMware Data Recovery, and Solaris FLARs. Progent can help your company to design, upgrade, or maintain data backup systems for a variety of architectures including on-premises, edge to datacenter, cloud-based, or hybrid. For more information, see Backup and Restore Solutions Consulting and Support Services.
Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) Data Recovery Consultants
Progent's expert Microsoft SCDPM engineers can help your company to develop an effective disaster recovery strategy, design a cost-effective high-availability IT architecture, install a Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager-based recovery solution, thoroughly validate your DPM system, educate your IT personnel or regular consultants how to manage SCDPM, or provide complete IT support outsourcing such as off-site housing of virtual or physical SCDPM servers in Progent's data center. For more information, visit System Center Data Protection Manager Consulting Services.
Barracuda Backup Local, Offsite and Cloud Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is a low-cost, subscription backup and disaster recovery platform for small and medium-size businesses. A Barracuda Backup solution can include a custom-designed hardware appliance built by Barracuda or a software-based appliance with comparable functionality but which uses your existing storage hardware. Barracuda Backup protects vital business data produced locally, at one or multiple remote locations, or in the cloud. For disaster recovery, you can replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud, to Amazon Web Services (AWS), or to any location with a Barracuda Backup appliance. Progent is a certified Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consulting experts can provide a broad array of consulting services to assist your business to plan, integrate, manage and troubleshoot a backup and disaster recovery solution based on Barracuda technology. For additional information, see Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting and management.
Altaro VM Backup Solutions for Backup and Disaster Recovery
Altaro VM Backup provides small organizations a reliable and budget-friendly solution for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-based VMs. Altaro VM Backup can be deployed in on-premises, offsite, multi-site, and cloud-hosted environments and also enables low-cost backup to Azure Block Blob storage. Top features include industry-leading inline deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals as low as five minutes for minimizing your exposure to data loss, military-grade encryption, item-level restore options for specific files and emails, extensive support for Windows CSV and VMware vCenter for handling larger environments, and support for Microsoft VSS technology to back up online VMs without downtime. Progent is a certified Altaro partner and offers a broad array of services to help you to design, deploy, manage and troubleshoot a backup/restore solution powered by Altaro VM Backup software. For more information, see Altaro VM Backup Consulting Services.
Consulting for Double-Take Solutions for Backup/Restore
Double-Take publishes a selection of products designed to deliver small businesses a variety of affordable alternatives for backing up and recovering business-critical workloads such as Exchange, SQL, RIM Blackberry, and Microsoft SharePoint. Progent’s business continuity planning consultants have in-depth backgrounds integrating Double-Take Software products into small business information networks to create an advanced state of fault tolerance and business continuity capability at a budget-friendly cost. For details, see Consulting for Double-Take Software for Backup.
CRISC-Certified Network Risk Control
The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) program was established by ISACA in 2010 to validate an IT professional's skills to plan, deploy, and maintain information system control mechanisms to mitigate risk. Progent offers the expertise of a CRISC-certified engineer to assist your company to develop and execute a workplace continuity strategy based on leading practices promoted by CRISC and crafted to align with your organization's risk appetite, business objectives, and budgetary guidelines. For more information, visit CRISC-Premier network risk control specialists.
Why Choose Progent for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Certified Partner and offers professional application consulting for a broad range of business software programs, Progent is able to assist customers to arrive at complete IT solutions that maximize the productivity of your IT network. As a Registered Partner for Cisco, Progent can provide the support of certified engineers and specialists with expertise in architecting, deploying and troubleshooting infrastructure environments based on Cisco products. The broad scope of Progent's technical experience and Progent's appreciation for the requirements of small businesses make Progent the ideal resource for creating and maintaining a cost-effective, dependable network.
How You Can Access Progent's Consultants for High Availability Network Support
In order to contact Progent about technical assistance for non-stop networking, call
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Sun Solaris Remote Consultant
24-7 Linux Remote Specialist
Progent provides nationwide urgent phone support and troubleshooting services for businesses who operate UNIX, Linux, or Solaris networks or whose information systems include a combination of UNIX and Microsoft products. Online IT help offers maximum leverage for your IT budget by preserving client productivity and limiting the time charged for computer analysis and repair. Sophisticated online support tools and skilled technicians and engineers combine to enable Progent to handle most network problems without squandering time and expense by traveling to your location. In most of situations your IT problems can be dealt with over the phone or via a mix of telephone support and remote access. Progent can put you in touch with Cisco certified CCIE network experts and CISM and CISSP premier security specialists to assist you with the most challenging system problems.
CIO Computer Consultants
Professionals CIO
Progent can provide the part-time assistance of a seasoned Chief Information Officer to provide a broad perspective to assist your company select and support network solutions appropriate for your present needs and that can serve as a solid basis for your future growth. Progent's part-time or temporary Chief Information Officer services offer financial leverage to companies who want to optimize the impact of their network investment but who are without the budget or hesitant to take on one more high-level position to their full-time staff. Because Progent is vendor-agnostic, with a sizable team of engineers certified to support all leading OS platforms and connectivity technologies plus a wide range and business software, Progent is in a unique situation to offer objective advice as well as advanced technical support for developing IT systems that match the special requirements of your business.
ProSight Email Guard Spam Filtering Services Specialist
ProSight Spam Filtering Consulting
Progent's ProSight Email Guard uses the services and infrastructure of leading information security companies to provide web-based control and comprehensive security for all your inbound and outbound email. The powerful architecture of Progent's Email Guard combines a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises gateway device to offer advanced protection against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-based malware. ProSight Email Guard's Cloud Protection Layer serves as a preliminary barricade and blocks most threats from making it to your security perimeter. This reduces your vulnerability to external threats and saves system bandwidth and storage. ProSight Email Guard's on-premises gateway appliance adds a further level of inspection for inbound email. For outbound email, the local gateway provides anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, DLP, and email encryption. The on-premises gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and protect internal email traffic that stays within your corporate firewall.
Consultant Security Audit
Consultant Security
Progent provides expertise for security auditing packages such as Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer for performing a set of programmed system testing scans to uncover potential security problems. Progent has broad experience with network analysis tools and can show you how to understand audit reports and respond effectively. Progent can show you how to design security into your company processes, install auditing applications, define and deploy a protected network architecture, and suggest policies to optimize the safety of your network. Progent's security professionals are ready to show you how to configure a firewall, design secure remote access to email and business applications, and integrate virtual private network. Progent's qualified security engineers can also validate the security of web software and can run extensive information security evaluations of company-wide security to validate your organization's compliance with recognized industry security standards such as FISMA, NIST, and ISO 17799.
Essentials for Hyper-V Professionals
Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V Engineers
Progent's Citrix experts can assist you to evaluate the potential business value of the available versions of Essentials for Hyper-V, help you to integrate Citrix administration tools with your Hyper-V network, and demonstrate to you how you can deploy Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V to enhance the responsiveness, availability, flexibility, and fault tolerance of your virtualized network while lowering the cost of resources and support and streamlining administrative tasks.
Microsoft Windows Cluster Consulting
Microsoft Certified Expert Microsoft Exchange Cluster Consulting Services
Progent provides Windows 2003 Cluster Server assistance to help your business deploy fault-tolerant server clusters that can deliver 24x7 uptime. Windows cluster servers for zero-downtime systems include Windows Cluster Server, SQL Cluster, and Exchange Server Cluster. By showing you how too design zero-downtime server clustering environments around Microsoft Windows Server Cluster 2003, Progent’s Premier Windows experts ensure that your zero-downtime server clusters are configured to maximize the competitive value of your IT network.
24-7 Juniper SSG550M Router Technical Support Services
Technical Support Juniper SSG140 Router
Progent's Juniper-certified consultants can help your business plan the deployment of Juniper SSG integrated firewall/VPN products, configure security policies to match your operational requirements, set up network OS software to streamline management processes, migrate from legacy Juniper products, and troubleshoot infrastructure issues.
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