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Chapter 3 Service EdenFX Systems

3.2 Consulting EdenFX Systems (under construction)

3.2.1 ISP

3.2.2 Hotels

3.2.3 Banking & Insurance

system evaluation and documentation

Anything without warranty that doesn't have spare parts on hand gets replaced, anything critical without internal hardware redundancy (multiple power supplies on different circuits, RAID etc) gets replaced.

Use other people to deliver the bad news.

Desktops spiceworks

Use an web/online Task List http://www.pivotaltracker.com

by seeking out and acknowledging the problems you are essentially taking ownership of them

CLEAR STATEMENT OF WORK, and ensure it includes DOCUMENTATION

audit after you have some type of documentation of the systems to help you come up with a good system-design

I come in, document everything, reverse engineer it all, and usually redo the entire organization from the ground up to get it set up right

• Backups plus tested restores
• SAN - start here for the greatest flexibility
• Configuration management
• Change management
• Migrate as much to servers from desktops as possible
• Deploy FLOSS when it makes sense
• cups for print ($0)
• alfresco for CIFS ($0)
• Zimbra for an Exchange replacement ($0)
• OpenLDAP unless you have a large scale setup. Then Redhat makes something that scales to many millions of accounts.
• OpenVPN for remote access
• Deploy commercial tools when there isn't a good FLOSS solution
• Dump as much Microsoft infrastructure as possible. Get off that drug. OpenOffice can easily replace most MS-Office instances.
• Virtualize all servers if possible. Avoid being screwed by VMware. LXC and KVM are solid and viable VM solutions.

I've definitely cost 6 in house IT guys their jobs, and possibly more.

The combo of Observium (network monitoring), Hobbit (monitor everything with extreme ease), and either ESXi or Proxmox VE for consolidation and ease of management/isolation/testing/etc has served me well for years to take control of large organizations quickly. Last two business I was hired to fix, I set this up and then built a parallel enterprise as VMs (the right way this time) and then cut everyone over in a weekend. No one noticed the change except to say stuff didn;t crash anymore and it was really fast.

Also OpenFiler and NexentaStor make for a great SAN.

If you need more: PFSense for firewall or VLAN router, BlueIris for IP cameras, PBX in a Flash for VoIP, SoGo for Outlook compatible email, LibreOffice, etc.