The Starfire Technologies Methodology

It's this simple: If you aren't aware of weak points in your IT environment, you may be condemning your organization to poor performance with high operational costs. Even worse, you may run the risk of serious failure which is easily recognized and preventable using Starfire's methodologies.

 

Know what you need to do - Get it right the first time

Don't reinvent the wheel:

Starfire Technologies has developed a range of methodologies and tools for assessing IT environments. By systematically reviewing environments, elegant solutions can be designed to suit your business needs. This enables optimal architectural designs to improve performance and reduce costs utilizing economies of operation by leveraging existing components and deploying new ones when necessary.

Starfire provides two conceptual levels of consulting services:

Project Architecture - Starfire provides architects to address specific issues where expertise is required, ranging from providing support to full architectural design capabilities.

Solution Mapping - Provision of broader review & assessment services. Potential issues are unearthed early before they become major problems avoiding poor performance and expensive fixes later.

Solutions Assurance:

This is a quality control mechanism to ensure optimal results. Starfire personnel devise a complete check list of action points designed specifically for each individual case.

Starfire's Process:

Starfire Technologies has a stratified process of consulting offerings to achieve optimal results:

Fitness Check: Preliminary step, predominately conducted by remote to gain a basic picture of an IT environment - Report produced

Health Check: Diagnosis only -This involves an appropriate (limited) time on site to identify issues (pain points), and assess & review the environment in depth - Report produced

Currency: Addresses upgrades of software and hardware (derived from health check) - old to new – addresses issues such as meeting capacity, performance, and time window requirements

Optimize: A full report is developed with options to address current performance issues and examine future directions – identify needs to enhance operations (examples - encryption, compression, data de-duplication)

Capacity: Addresses environmental requirements both current and into the future for items such as tape, disk, servers, and SAN.

Conversion: This is where alternative approaches are explored and implemented to address high cost areas, areas of under performance, or areas that are impairing overall performance.

Mentoring: Empowers your staff to fully understand the architecture and components in their IT environment. Transfer of skills is a key element for ongoing success.

Technology is not static. As new technologies become available possibilities emerge to help run your IT systems better, opening superior paths to scale systems to handle escalating challenges. We can help you to better understand your options and make the right decisions. Take advantage of our expertise.

Think it through - Plan to succeed