September 2009 Newsletter
The SysArc Report
September 2009
Call SysArc now : 301-231-5252
A message from the SysArc team: We hope you had an enjoyable summer as we all head back to work and to school. A lot of exciting things have been happening lately at SysArc. We have added several new managed services clients, successfully completed a few projects, expanded our service offerings and a new office location, added members to our technical support and business development teams and developed a couple of new strategic partnerships.
In this Issue of the SysArc Report:
Sep 14, 2009
We Have Another Network Engineer Job Opening
Job Title: Network Engineer – Level II
Locations: Rockville, MD and Washington, DC
Status: Full-Time, Employee
Job Category: Field Services
Relevant Work Experience: 5-9 Years
Career Level: Experienced (Non-Manager)
We are currently seeking another highly skilled field engineer with the drive and determination to help us support our quickly growing client base. This position reports directly to our Service Manager. We are looking for an individual who is a problem-solver and has a proven track record of working within a team environment to successfully address challenging user computing issues, and is accustomed to leveraging technical training opportunities to improve their skills. If you have the experience and the desire, we'd like to talk to you.
Our field engineers are responsible for maintaining user uptime and improving their computing experiences through effective onsite maintenance and problem identification and resolution activities, as well as growing and developing the organization’s perception with existing customers through exceptional customer service. Candidates must be energetic and focused with a strong motivation to learn new technologies and management and maintenance processes. This position requires dedication, persistence, follow-up, effective utilization of provided resources and unbeatable customer service.
This position will include identifying user problems and working within a structured problem management and resolution process to remediate them within established SLAs, and involves working with other resources and vendors to deliver effective field support services. Responsibilities include identifying, documenting and troubleshooting user computing issues to resolution and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Job duties include utilizing our professional services automation (PSA) solution along with other service-specific tools and technologies to deliver onsite user support services and update service request information and collaborate and work with other staff and vendor support resources to resolve issues. Overall relationship management and the ability to coordinate required resources to respond to complex IT requirements are desired. Other requirements include participating in ongoing training and attainment of manufacturer certifications and developing and maintaining relationships with user and vendor contacts.
Minimum Skills Required:
• Minimum five years experience in a similar type company providing outsourced IT support and Consulting services
• Current MCSE Certification
• Experience with Cisco and similar networking technologies a plus
• Strong interpersonal skills required to effectively communicate with users and vendors
• Passion for teamwork, continuing education, problem solving and exceptional customer service
• Must be well spoken, outgoing, organized, detailed-orientated, dependable and flexible
• Valid driver's license and proof of insurance
• Background check and drug screen required
• Reliable transportation
This Position Entails:
• Troubleshooting user problems onsite
• Accurate documentation of all activities conducted
• The ability to manage, maintain, troubleshoot and support our users’ networks, equipment, software and services
• The ability to learn quickly and adapt to changing requirements
The Successful Candidate must be:
• Professional and articulate
• Interpersonally adept
• Technically proficient
• A relationship builder
• A problem solver
Benefits include group medical/dental insurance, paid vacation, holidays, personal & sick time and training reimbursement. Our generous compensation plans are structured as salary plus bonuses for meeting utilization, compliance and customer service requirements, with initial compensation commensurate with relevant experience.
Qualified candidates please submit a current resume, along with salary history.
Job Title: Network Engineer – Level II
Locations: Rockville, MD and Washington, DC
Status: Full-Time, Employee
Job Category: Field Services
Relevant Work Experience: 5-9 Years
Career Level: Experienced (Non-Manager)
We are currently seeking another highly skilled field engineer with the drive and determination to help us support our quickly growing client base. This position reports directly to our Service Manager. We are looking for an individual who is a problem-solver and has a proven track record of working within a team environment to successfully address challenging user computing issues, and is accustomed to leveraging technical training opportunities to improve their skills. If you have the experience and the desire, we'd like to talk to you.
Our field engineers are responsible for maintaining user uptime and improving their computing experiences through effective onsite maintenance and problem identification and resolution activities, as well as growing and developing the organization’s perception with existing customers through exceptional customer service. Candidates must be energetic and focused with a strong motivation to learn new technologies and management and maintenance processes. This position requires dedication, persistence, follow-up, effective utilization of provided resources and unbeatable customer service.
This position will include identifying user problems and working within a structured problem management and resolution process to remediate them within established SLAs, and involves working with other resources and vendors to deliver effective field support services. Responsibilities include identifying, documenting and troubleshooting user computing issues to resolution and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Job duties include utilizing our professional services automation (PSA) solution along with other service-specific tools and technologies to deliver onsite user support services and update service request information and collaborate and work with other staff and vendor support resources to resolve issues. Overall relationship management and the ability to coordinate required resources to respond to complex IT requirements are desired. Other requirements include participating in ongoing training and attainment of manufacturer certifications and developing and maintaining relationships with user and vendor contacts.
Minimum Skills Required:
• Minimum five years experience in a similar type company providing outsourced IT support and Consulting services
• Current MCSE Certification
• Experience with Cisco and similar networking technologies a plus
• Strong interpersonal skills required to effectively communicate with users and vendors
• Passion for teamwork, continuing education, problem solving and exceptional customer service
• Must be well spoken, outgoing, organized, detailed-orientated, dependable and flexible
• Valid driver's license and proof of insurance
• Background check and drug screen required
• Reliable transportation
This Position Entails:
• Troubleshooting user problems onsite
• Accurate documentation of all activities conducted
• The ability to manage, maintain, troubleshoot and support our users’ networks, equipment, software and services
• The ability to learn quickly and adapt to changing requirements
The Successful Candidate must be:
• Professional and articulate
• Interpersonally adept
• Technically proficient
• A relationship builder
• A problem solver
Benefits include group medical/dental insurance, paid vacation, holidays, personal & sick time and training reimbursement. Our generous compensation plans are structured as salary plus bonuses for meeting utilization, compliance and customer service requirements, with initial compensation commensurate with relevant experience.
Qualified candidates please submit a current resume, along with salary history.
Sep 14, 2009
Is Tape Backup Really Your Best Solution?
With the recent advances in backup technology, there is an alternative to the common tape backup systems that can contain many hidden risks and dangers. Several organizations have reported that a large percentage of tape backup jobs contain errors and many more do not even test the restore function of their backups on a regular basis.� For those that do, they are often shocked to find that their disaster recovery capabilities are severely compromised. As such, most experts agree that tape is quickly becoming an inferior media for backing up data.� Furthermore, this approach requires significant manual intervention in addition to the need to be physically moved offsite.� In many cases, this means the IT person actually takes the backup tape home---Yikes!!
Organizations that are truly concerned about their data are rapidly evaluating alternative solutions.� Increasingly, organizations are looking at Online Backup Services from third-party providers.� In much the same way that Storage Area Networks (SAN) are replacing file servers, online backup is making tape backup obsolete.� The reasons include a significant drop in disk storage costs, a substantial increase in bandwidth speeds as well as dramatically improved security and recovery capabilities.� However, the real benefit of online storage is the flexibility to automatically backup your data securely to an offsite Data Center and provide your end-users with immediate access to files that need to be recovered. Even a file as small as a single email can be quickly and securely recovered. Now, contrast this with a tape backup approach in which end-users may need to wait hours or days to find and recover a single email. When you need to recover an email, which approach would you prefer?
In addition to faster recovery times, an online backup solution can be implemented relatively easily.� Automatic backups of your servers and desktops can be configured to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device on defined time intervals (i.e. every 15 minutes for email and transactional databases, once a day for other data).� The NAS device is comparable to a server with contains a disk array to hold all of your backup files as well as function as a traffic manager to encrypt and transmit your data over the internet to the offsite Data Center.�� At this point, you will actually have two backups, one on the NAS device and one at the offsite Data Center.� An additional copy of your backup can also be sent to a redundant facility in case a catastrophic event occurs at one of the Data Centers.
The price of using an online service provider is very reasonable although there can be significant pricing differences in the marketplace.� In general, the prices should be in the $5-$10 per compressed Gigabyte (GB), per month range.� Some vendors charge for uncompressed versus compressed data which can result in a large variance in the cost of your solution as most data can be compressed as much as 50%.�� There is still some confusion in the marketplace around this issue, so make sure you understand all the variables before committing.
Lastly, increased legal, compliance and regulatory issues need to be considered when organizations secure their sensitive and critical data.� For many an organization, an online backup solution was the saving grace in a catastrophe.� Let’s hope you never need it!
With the recent advances in backup technology, there is an alternative to the common tape backup systems that can contain many hidden risks and dangers. Several organizations have reported that a large percentage of tape backup jobs contain errors and many more do not even test the restore function of their backups on a regular basis.� For those that do, they are often shocked to find that their disaster recovery capabilities are severely compromised. As such, most experts agree that tape is quickly becoming an inferior media for backing up data.� Furthermore, this approach requires significant manual intervention in addition to the need to be physically moved offsite.� In many cases, this means the IT person actually takes the backup tape home---Yikes!!
Organizations that are truly concerned about their data are rapidly evaluating alternative solutions.� Increasingly, organizations are looking at Online Backup Services from third-party providers.� In much the same way that Storage Area Networks (SAN) are replacing file servers, online backup is making tape backup obsolete.� The reasons include a significant drop in disk storage costs, a substantial increase in bandwidth speeds as well as dramatically improved security and recovery capabilities.� However, the real benefit of online storage is the flexibility to automatically backup your data securely to an offsite Data Center and provide your end-users with immediate access to files that need to be recovered. Even a file as small as a single email can be quickly and securely recovered. Now, contrast this with a tape backup approach in which end-users may need to wait hours or days to find and recover a single email. When you need to recover an email, which approach would you prefer?
In addition to faster recovery times, an online backup solution can be implemented relatively easily.� Automatic backups of your servers and desktops can be configured to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device on defined time intervals (i.e. every 15 minutes for email and transactional databases, once a day for other data).� The NAS device is comparable to a server with contains a disk array to hold all of your backup files as well as function as a traffic manager to encrypt and transmit your data over the internet to the offsite Data Center.�� At this point, you will actually have two backups, one on the NAS device and one at the offsite Data Center.� An additional copy of your backup can also be sent to a redundant facility in case a catastrophic event occurs at one of the Data Centers.
The price of using an online service provider is very reasonable although there can be significant pricing differences in the marketplace.� In general, the prices should be in the $5-$10 per compressed Gigabyte (GB), per month range.� Some vendors charge for uncompressed versus compressed data which can result in a large variance in the cost of your solution as most data can be compressed as much as 50%.�� There is still some confusion in the marketplace around this issue, so make sure you understand all the variables before committing.
Lastly, increased legal, compliance and regulatory issues need to be considered when organizations secure their sensitive and critical data.� For many an organization, an online backup solution was the saving grace in a catastrophe.� Let’s hope you never need it!
Sep 14, 2009
The Advanatges of Network Monitoring Tools
The utilization of properly configured network monitoring tools and applications can be used to proactively monitor, maintain, support and help stabilize your technical systems around the clock with little or no manual intervention required. As such, serious potential problems can be rapidly identified before they turn into critical issues that may affect the stability of your entire infrastructure or company. For example, disk utilization can be monitored with user-definable alerts configured to be delivered directly to your system administrator or network support engineer only when certain thresholds are met and/or exceeded so that a server crash can often be avoided or potentially anticipated with enough to advert a potential disastrous situation.
Disk utilization is just one of hundreds of components that can be actively and proactively monitored by some of the more robust network monitoring applications and network management tools currently available in our marketplace. In addition, there are many items and services that should be regularly monitored to ensure the optimal uptime and optimization of your network environment. These items typically include:
- Device Availability
- Critical Application/Service Status
- Disk Utilization
- Memory Utilization
- Response Time Monitoring
- Back-up log checks
- Anti-virus log checks
- Event Log Monitoring
- Monitoring custom performance parameters
- Server health check and analysis of key trends
- Critical Alert Notification
- Asset Tracking
- Remote Access
With all the detailed data that is captured on a daily basis, detailed and comprehensive reports can be quickly created and may be used by your management team and associates to help support your corporate and strategic planning, budgeting process and formulation, as well as enhance your regulatory compliance efforts
Be proactive, implement a comprehensive 24/7 monitoring solution in your infrastructure environment today and sleep easier at night!
The utilization of properly configured network monitoring tools and applications can be used to proactively monitor, maintain, support and help stabilize your technical systems around the clock with little or no manual intervention required. As such, serious potential problems can be rapidly identified before they turn into critical issues that may affect the stability of your entire infrastructure or company. For example, disk utilization can be monitored with user-definable alerts configured to be delivered directly to your system administrator or network support engineer only when certain thresholds are met and/or exceeded so that a server crash can often be avoided or potentially anticipated with enough to advert a potential disastrous situation.
Disk utilization is just one of hundreds of components that can be actively and proactively monitored by some of the more robust network monitoring applications and network management tools currently available in our marketplace. In addition, there are many items and services that should be regularly monitored to ensure the optimal uptime and optimization of your network environment. These items typically include:
- Device Availability
- Critical Application/Service Status
- Disk Utilization
- Memory Utilization
- Response Time Monitoring
- Back-up log checks
- Anti-virus log checks
- Event Log Monitoring
- Monitoring custom performance parameters
- Server health check and analysis of key trends
- Critical Alert Notification
- Asset Tracking
- Remote Access
With all the detailed data that is captured on a daily basis, detailed and comprehensive reports can be quickly created and may be used by your management team and associates to help support your corporate and strategic planning, budgeting process and formulation, as well as enhance your regulatory compliance efforts
Be proactive, implement a comprehensive 24/7 monitoring solution in your infrastructure environment today and sleep easier at night!
Sep 9, 2009
SysArc Deploys RSS Feed
Stay current with all of our most recent computer and network support offerings and latest updates by subscribing to our new Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Please see http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/69294RQhyhNpN for details
Stay current with all of our most recent computer and network support offerings and latest updates by subscribing to our new Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Please see http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/69294RQhyhNpN for details
Aug 31, 2009
Leading Vacation Destination Site Based in Maryland Selects SysArc for Network Services
SysArc was selected to design and deploy a secure and highly available network infrastructure to support over 80,000 users and millions of web-based transactions per year for this Maryland provider of destination vacations.
SysArc was selected to design and deploy a secure and highly available network infrastructure to support over 80,000 users and millions of web-based transactions per year for this Maryland provider of destination vacations.
Aug 18, 2009
SysArc Announces Launch of Official Corporate Blog
SysArc is pleased to announce the launch of our Official Corporate Blog--please be sure to visit frequently to learn more about the latest happenings at SysArc, see our most recent job postings, download our informative White Papers, read our Press Releases plus a whole lot more!
SysArc is pleased to announce the launch of our Official Corporate Blog--please be sure to visit frequently to learn more about the latest happenings at SysArc, see our most recent job postings, download our informative White Papers, read our Press Releases plus a whole lot more!
Jul 29, 2009
Washington DC Accounting Firm Selects SysArc for Network Support Services!
SysArc will assist with an existing support vendor transition, provide a variety of IT and technical consulting services, deploy our managed services applications and tools, implement a technical support infrastructure and provide responsive and reliable on-going computer repair and network support services.
SysArc will assist with an existing support vendor transition, provide a variety of IT and technical consulting services, deploy our managed services applications and tools, implement a technical support infrastructure and provide responsive and reliable on-going computer repair and network support services.
Have a Great Month !
SysARc: Toll Free 301-231-5252 - info@sysarc.com - www.sysarc.com
