Support Services

Custom Support

Major Projects

rackAID handles projects large and small. For larger scale installation, cluster design, and high availability systems, we suggest a full deployment plan. rackAID can assist you with provider selection, server sizing and other deployment issues. Generally whenever a project requires more than an estimated 10 hours of work, we handle this as a major project with distinct phases: initial consultation, deployment plan, server deployment/testing, project activation, and project management.

Initial Consultation

Depending on the project an initial consultation of 2 or more hours is required. During the consultation, we will outline the goals of the projects, gather the initial parameters, and develop a timeline for future milestones. Our experience with projects ranging from 2 server clusters to 40 server Web 2.0 projects allows us to quickly hone in on a solution to meet your needs and budget. Once our initial consultation is completed, we work internally to deliver you a deployment plan.

Deployment Plan

With major deployment or even complicated 2 server clusters, we often recommend a written deployment plan. This will define the scope of work, our responsibilities, your responsibilities and timelines so the project moves ahead. Deployment plans prevent feature creep and second guessing. With complex managed hosting, small changes in one component can have significant impact on other components. Unless the change is one that is critical, we often postpone changes until after the first round of deployment. We may go through many rounds of deployment with checks and feedback at each stage. This process assures we both have clear expectations of the final product.

Deployment and Testing

Once planning is completed, we can deploy your solution. In most cases, we prefer to have all hardware and network level components in place before we start software level configurations. Having the core infrastructure in place allows us to focus on the software layer without interruption. In some cases, deployments may be done in phases but in general we find it best to have core components installed and ready to be configured before we launch the software/configuration phase of the project.

Depending on the complexity and requirements of the project, we may have extensive testing to do. We urge you not to rush in to a solution that has not had proper testing. Load balancing, high availability and other features of complex managed hosting have to be thoroughly tested before being brought live. This is especially true with Web 2.0 and community sites where user submitted content starts to build up. To prevent setbacks, we can help devise complete testing plans for reliability, disaster recovery and performance.

Project Activation

Once the testing is complete, we are ready to turn-on the project. We typically schedule this with you so that we can have ample staff available during the first few weeks of operations. Even with proper planning, unforeseen problems can arise, so we want to be ready.

Project Management

After about 1-4 weeks, we usually convert your project to management status. We ask that major development work be done on dedicated development systems. Once moved to management status, we can focus on maintaining your newly installed systems to keep them operating error free. We've worked with cluster projects from simple two server fail-over solutions to 30 cluster systems delivering millions of pages of rich-content every day. Talk to us. We are here to help you plan, deploy and maintain your IT infrastructure.