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Managed IT Stories

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Read about some of the ways our Support Practice Group has helped its clients stay productive.

A 500-user Litigation and Arbitration firm with eight international offices decided to take advantage of a building mandated power shutdown at their New York City office this past weekend. Their server room was chaotic, full of thickets of wires and cables that made it a challenge to manage the systems in a timely manner in the face of issues.

In preparation for the building’s power shutdown, a Kraft Kennedy consultant began by failing over the firm’s colocation facility in Phoenix so that users would have uninterrupted access to the network. From there, he and the team started work on the cleanup, completely gutting the New York server room and re-racking and re-cabling everything from scratch.

The result was a highly efficient, impeccable setup. Now, in the event of issues, the firm’s cables can easily be traced back to the hardware for faster resolution. The team also took advantage of the downtime to make several architectural changes to the network, creating a dedicated storage network for improved performance and overall network health.

 


 

Kraft Kennedy’s Support Practice Group engineers received an alert that a 100-person firm was, unbeknownst to them, experiencing a spike in disk space usage.

Remoting in to the firm’s server from the New York office, a consultant checked on the firm’s Exchange configuration, event logs, and disk usage, and saw a log buildup threatening to take down the firm’s database. Once full, it would leave users without email instantaneously, not giving the firm’s internal IT team a chance to remediate the issue. A Kraft Kennedy consultant set up circular logging so that the logs would keep building but only the most recent 20GB would be maintained, keeping the database running. Users were able to keep working without ever realizing how close they came to losing access to their most critical system.

 


 

While monitoring a small law firm’s network, a member of Kraft Kennedy’s Support Practice Group noticed a severe spike in temperature in its server room.

This firm had recently moved to a new office in White Plains, and was relying on Kraft Kennedy to help it with the technical details of the move. Overheated servers can lead to the failure of an entire network, leaving users without their critical systems, and prolonged overheating can lead to permanent damage and shortened lifespan. Kraft Kennedy was promptly alerted of the dangerous heat levels around the firm’s servers and a consultant arrived onsite within an hour to remediate the problem. The network stayed up without any impact on the users and the equipment remained unharmed.

 


 

A new Support Practice Group client, a 50-attorney firm, wanted to resolve its issues with backups before it made the transition from its previous managed services provider. A power outage had recently left a large amount of the firm’s data corrupted.

Even worse, Kraft Kennedy found that there had not been any successful backups since. As a result, attorneys and staff did not have access to current production data and were unable to continue working on their projects. The firm was losing time and money.

Kraft Kennedy investigated and was able to retrieve data from three-month-old backup tapes, which were in a secondary, read-only share. This allowed the firm to access current, non-corrupted data to keep working. Users were also given the option to recover corrupted documents from the archive if necessary.

To avoid future work-stopping disasters like the power outage, the Support Practice Group chose Datto for the firm as an appropriate consistent, off-site backup solution.