Infrastructure

OPEN SOURCE INFRASTRUCTURE

The effectiveness of your information system is linked to the system and network infrastructure on which it relies: our task is to help you improve this infrastructure whilst reducing its cost. To do this, we recommend using open source tools . Today there are enough advanced solutions to cover every area of IT infrastructure. For simplicity, we group together different types of solutions into four families:

Performance management : supervision of the infrastructure and website monitoring
Improvement of the infrastructure : performance testing and tuning, virtualisaton and software appliances
Access management : Infrastructures with public keys (ICP, PKI, IGC), LDAP and SSO (Single Sign On) directories
Migration to open source : emails and groupware, office suites.

To build your solutions, our services include analysis, advice, production and training of your teams. If you would like to produce your own solution, we can help you with project management or even provide you with the support of our expert engineers during all production stages of your project.

> Performance management: supervision of the infrastructure and monitoring of the website

For managing the performance of your system and network infrastructure over time, we recommend implementing Nagios, a monitoring solution that is well known in the open source world. From project design to using the interface and the installation of “probes”, we help you to manage the smooth running of your infrastructure in a simple and effective way. There are several other tools that can be used to measure the availability of your website.

> Improving the infrastructure: performance testing and tuning, virtualisation and software appliances

To improve the design of various components of your infrastructure (database, application server, file system etc.) or in order to anticipate a load increase, we carry out a series of performance tests (load handling, maximum load, stress reaction etc.) You can then finely tune your infrastructure and adapt it to suit your requirements. The improvement of your infrustructure also includes virtualisation, that consists of simulating, using a real server, the existence of multiple partitioned and shared servers. This operation reduces the cost of your materials and maintenance, whilst strengthening the administrating and security of your server inventory. We recommend using high performance open source tools such as Xen. In addition to their inherent advantages (no license fees, scalable, adaptable etc.) open source virtualisation tools make it easier to implement software appliances (or “application packages”).

> Email and groupware

Today, it is becoming increasingly natural and cost effective to equip user workstations with free software. In fact, with similar functionality to commercial alternatives, their technical and cost advantages make the differences essentially confined to training users on system usage. This is why we include migration advice in our systems and network services offering.