One Principle Guides Multiple Capabilities
With the tectonic shifts taking place in today’s complex business environment, David-Kenneth Group’s technical solutions are guided by one principle: Your business strategy must inform and influence your data center strategy, including a proactive, hybrid IT infrastructure plan that is ready for tomorrow’s borderless data center.
Technical Capabilities
VP Delivery Services
David-Kenneth Group
Compute and Virtualization
We help our clients do more with less by taking a broad look at what is possible, while leveraging the latest developments and offerings. Whether the solutions are improved density and resource utilization, self-provisioning, capacity planning, centralized management, or license optimization, the end goal is to realize as many significant functional, organizational, and financial gains as possible.
Network Design
Networking is experiencing significant change, disruptive technologies, and market implications. We help our clients understand the latest technologies like software defined networking (SDN) as well as high demand technologies such as Palo Alto and F5 and discern the optimal choice for their business needs. Our designs take into consideration all the core elements that networking must support such as security, voice, storage, latency, and redundancy.
Storage
Storage solutions have evolved far beyond simply choosing a vendor platform. We help our clients navigate the choice of vendors with their various pros and cons, both business and technical. Often, particular vendors offer strengths in certain areas, but the “completeness” of their solution, or their track record of support, falls short.
Storage accounts for a significant portion of year-on-year growth costs. To manage cost increases, we recommend that clients abstract the storage layer of their environment. This approach ideally positions an organization to leverage future developments and cost savings, and it frees core applications from being bound to a particular platform.
By designing a solution that supports all aspects of backup, synchronization, disaster recovery, and tiered performance, while also managing costs and vendor lock-in, an organization is positioned to maximize their return on investment now and in the future.
Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
CI and HCI growth is fueled by declining costs, all flash storage nodes, scalable architecture, and the promise of easily adding capacity. For these reasons, it will be an important component in the future architecture of the data center. Adopting CI and HCI can be complicated due to concerns about vendor lock-in and about how this architecture fits within the traditional labor categories of IT.
David-Kenneth Group can help you navigate the decision making process for both the technical use case as well as the business use case. We can help identify the complexities of migrating your environment to the convergence stratosphere and assist you with understanding the appropriate workloads and application of the CI/HCI platform
Cloud
“The cloud” constitutes a multitude of possibilities. We help clients see beyond the hype and understand the real-world trade-offs, risks, costs, advantages, and options with such a solution. More importantly, we help develop an integrated cloud solution that truly leverages the strengths of a cloud offering for your business model.
By integrating its infrastructure into existing processes, the cloud becomes another option for workload placement and management. The end result is the ability to shift between various cloud providers and on-premise solutions. The result is an operating environment that dynamically responds to changing business needs all under a single pane of glass.
Security
We are experienced in servicing Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies in defense, finance, and media industries where security breaches could equate to loss of life, national headlines, or critical loss in revenue.
With deep experience serving high-profile clients, David-Kenneth Group brings the latest knowledge, technologies, and best practices to bear for our clients. Dynamic, multi-layered solutions that intelligently monitor all aspects of an environment against internal and external threats.
The difference between converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are the following:
- In converged infrastructure each discrete component in the building block can be used for its intended purpose. For example, a server can be separated and used as a server, just as the storage can be separated and used as functional storage.
- Hyper-Converged infrastructure is a software defined infrastructure technology that is completely integrated and cannot be physically broken into separate components.
How smart simplicity solves challenges
A Modernization Story: Unsupported Assets
A tier 1 service was found to be running on outdated hardware and software that was no longer supported by the vendor. The particular software license was further tied to its specific server hardware via NIC, disk sectors, and other physical data components. It prevented migration of the service onto newer hardware and posed an operational risk of non-recovery in the event of hardware failure. Neither additional licenses nor license transfers were available for the defunct software.
David-Kenneth Group’s solution was to virtualize the server while exercising multiple advanced spoofing techniques allowing us to fool the software license and mimic the specifics of the relic hardware. This solution required minimal effort to implement, resolved a critical, longstanding risk to production systems, and immediately reduced operational cost. It also enabled a more timely cutover of services in lieu of a slow, high-risk forklift migration.