Managed Services

XSI recommends a Managed Service that is designed to be complementary and cost effective to Customers. XSI offer a help desk service to track service requests, either generated in person or via the generation of an automated service request from the hardware or the software.

The System Administration staff is often tasked with addressing these needs daily whilst planning and resolving non-production issues related to the data backup and recovery solution. The reality XSI experiences in many organisations are that the production issues are resolved and the backup issues parked, to be dealt with at a time when resources are available.

With the engagement of XSI, backups become a production issue, we are resourced and focused on the resolution of such problems and do it in an open and consultative manner with your staff.

In our existing engagements XSI does not provide onsite operational staff. Our costing of such personnel indicates that the staff usage versus the costs is not commercially practicable. XSI does recognise the importance that the operational staff has on such a solution and do provide the following benefits and services in a managed arrangement to achieve the desired business and technical objectives. This arrangement would also provide Customers with the ability to monitor the access of XSI staff, as it is our general expectation that access to customer equipment and their premises is restricted.

The diagram below represents the basic elements involved in a typical backup solution. By engaging with XSI, Customers can combine these elements into an integrated operation that will deliver:

  • Reliable data backup performance
  • Confidence in recovery of data, at either the file or system level
  • The optimal utilisation of the available resources, hardware, software and people to contain the associated costs for the customer
  • A central point of control and technical strength that will support the current management and technical staff
XSI believe that by addressing these segments in a proactive manner we will be able to meet or exceed the expectations of Customers. In the proposed model XSI would take an active role in all the areas of administration, management and a guiding role in the operational tasks.

Elements of a data storage and protection infrastructure

Help desk& Escalations Backup Software Operations Backup Hardware System Administration Program Management & Reporting
  • Reporting
  • Situation management
    		•
  • Interaction with Backup product vendor development, support and licensing areas
  • Certified engineers in the product
  • Daily onsite tasks
  • Media management
  • All hardware service and maintenance is/can be administered and/or performed by XSI
  • Problem Solving
  • Server deployment
  • Solution reliability
  • Updates & fixes
    		•
  • Performance statistics
  • Measurement against SLA's

    • Central to the ongoing development of a data protection and recovery infrastructure and management process is the continual review of historical events and the planning of future events.

    The review of historical events is approached as a non-threatening mechanism whereby the Customer and XSI would de-construct particular events with the aim of improving service delivery and/or the technical configuration of the solution. In the same fashion the performance reporting and analysis of the solution characteristics combined with the expected business needs of the Customer would be used to plan for the future events.

    An example of the monthly reports would include:

    • List of all failed backups for the previous month
    • List of volume of tapes used for previous month
    • List of hardware failures/issues for previous month
    • List of failed recoveries for previous month
    • List of the number and data volumes of recoveries performed for the previous month
    • List of continued failures (i.e. same save set failure over more than 3 consecutive days)
    • List of new server deployments
    • List of changes made to the Backup Software or hardware configuration
    • List of service calls, current, closed and outstanding.

    These reports are highly flexible and would be tuned during the implementation phase to the Customers requirements

     

    Managed Services brochure (PDF)