Uclid

Technology Consultancy

At the core of almost every application in your company lies a database. Databases provide the underlying support to your customer service, production operations, internal operations, and sales and marketing. From day-to-day operations to strategic decision-making, your databases are the engines that drive your business. UCLID professionals have the experience and skill sets you need to ensure your database environments have high performance, security and accessibility.

Uclid’s Technology consulting services include the following:

• Strategic Planning for Database
• Database & Platform consolidation
• Database Upgrade and Migration
• Database Sizing, Design & Capacity Planning
• Database Audit and Health Check
• Business Continuity (Backup/ Recovery and process consulting)
• Performance Tuning

1. Strategic Planning for Database and Architecture

Strategic planning is not design. Nor is it implementation. However, knowledge of design, implementation, and operation of data-base systems are essential to the successful strategic plan. Strategic planning examines the intellectual processes necessary in order to consider rationally all the twists and nuances prerequisite to constructing reliable information systems in a business organization or government agency. The big picture is easy to understand, but the details are easier to see when someone who has been down the path before can guide you.

We do our research to help you avoid potential snags that lie ahead. The majority of databases powering today's leading companies are built on technology, but each implementation is unique. This is why we feel it is important to do an analysis of your needs and requirements before designing your database. We know the working of Databases inside and out, and do the researches that will help create a better application. Having us on board will help develop a better product, and help prevent mistakes that become more costly down the road.

By interviewing users or potential users of your product, we establish what their requirements of your database are going to be up front, before you sink money into unwanted or unnecessary features. The result of our analysis is a specification of needs: how the processes will flow from a user's perspective. We ask the right questions to get to the core of your users' needs, and to make sure the processes we outline correctly map to database functionality your users need.

Benefits:

• Expert performing the work.
• Right investment in Database & Architecture.
• Scalability & Performance
• Reducing the risk of failure.
• Configuration in line with Business requirements & budget.
• Time and cost savings

2. Database and Platform consolidation

Database sprawl costs money and not just in software licenses. It costs money in maintenance and hardware, and also hits businesses indirectly by impacting the performance of other applications. Through database consolidation, enterprises can cut the number of physical database servers they have to administer and reduce demand for servers and storage. Consolidation can also offer increased operational efficiency. With the case for consolidation this strong, the next step for enterprises is deciding how best to go about it. Uclid has assembled a list of tips for your organization before you embark on a consolidation project.

Key Areas of Concern:

• Data is spread around the company without a consistent way to ensure compliance with company policies.
• Database servers average less than 30% utilization, resulting in high hardware, energy and location costs.
• Databases are administered by individuals using different management practices for like applications.
• Most database instances do not have consistent backup or business continuity practices.
• Databases have short performance spikes during certain times of the year. As a result, IT administrators are concerned about virtualization performance overhead during those periods.
• Departments and end users often find it easier to deploy their own databases than go through the process of getting database services from IT.
• Lack of a server virtualization solution for the Mac OS X platform restricts organizations incorporating the Mac server to non-virtualized "One OS — One Machine" infrastructures

Benfits:

• Lower Costs — Hardware, energy, space
• Better Compliance — Consistent audit and retention policies
• Improved Management — Consistent management practices
• Better Administration — DBAs manage all database infrastructure
• Accurate Accounting — Departments charged for actual DB usage
• Better Service Levels — Backup, load balancing, and availability
• Platform Standardization — Standardize hardware with multi-OS availability

3. Database Upgrade and Migration

Uclid offers comprehensive Upgrade Services to assist organizations in upgrading their database environment to the latest version of Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase or DB2. Several popular platforms are discontinuing support of older versions, requiring organizations to upgrade to the latest versions and protect their data from the risk of critical issues with no fixes.

Though necessary, upgrades can also be a large resource burden and organizational inconvenience, resulting in downtime, functional changes and compatibility issues. Having Uclid manage your upgrades minimizes these challenges and ensures that your data is safely migrated using a process that has been proven across large and small organizations.

We frequently assist our clients with installations, upgrades, and migrations on most flavors of UNIX, including Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX. In addition, we work with Windows. We know that installing software involves more than just a "point and click" approach. Just check out some of our popular installation guides in the Resource Library section of our site. Upgrades and migrations have to be planned for carefully. We take a methodical and conservative approach to ensure we take our clients through this process smoothly. The know-how to provide testing, planning, and validating is critical in getting through these processes smoothly.

The Uclid Process Advantage

For upgrades, the key to quality is an efficient approach with stringent checks and verifications. Upgrade Services by Uclid consist of two distinct offerings that match two distinct needs of organizations Planning & Analysis Services and Migration Services. These offerings reflect a process that combines resources to manage and plan the process with a Migration Factory to efficiently carry out the upgrade. By leveraging Uclid Migration Factory approach, the process is defined so that organizations can leverage a proven, global operation and 24X365 optimized resources to perform the upgrades at off-peak hours in a cost-effective manner.

Why Risk Your Data?

End of support is rapidly approaching for a variety of popular database versions, including Oracle, Sybase and DB2. This means limited support, no new security updates, no new bug fixes, and no new certifications. dbaDIRECT can help and provide you what you need to avoid end of support issues.

Uclid offers a variety of database project services that can compliment your upgrade.

• Oracle Upgrade Services
• SQL Upgrade Services
• Sybase Upgrade Services
• DB2 Upgrade Services
• MySQL Upgrade Services

4. Database Design, Sizing & Capacity Planning.

Architecture and design is truly at the center of our Oracle Database Services offering. Whether it's for a self-contained business or an enterprise wide system, everyone knows it's extremely difficult to recover from poor or inappropriate design. We ensure that the most critical phase of systems development is done right.

A good database includes more than just good logical design; it also requires an optimized architecture of your hardware for maximum results. At Uclid,  we know our hardware, and we know how to get the best performance out of it. We ensure you have the proper hardware in the optimal configuration.

The logical design is a blueprint for the development of the database, and it is crucial that your database be built right from the very beginning. Database has many features, and we know how best to use them. This helps our clients avoid repeating processes, and use functionality available within the database from the very beginning.

A sizing is an approximation of the hardware resources required to support a specific software implementation.  It is important to understand that “sizing” the hardware for each customer’s Oracle database implementation is an iterative process, which may be refined and repeated a number of times

Capacity planning allows you to support growth with the appropriate technical infrastructure while giving finance visibility into investment needs. Capacity planning is much more than to know how much disk space you need. At Uclid, we develop accurate and efficient capacity plans by taking into consideration IO subsystems, network architecture, servers and DB architecture. We understand the dependencies and the need to view all the parts as a cohesive unit.

Design, Sizing & Capacity Planning must be based on a solid understanding of the technology. The experts at Uclid cover both development tools and the underlying database features.

Benefits:

• Database & Model stability
• Optimal use of database features for physical data models
• Easier development due to consistent naming throughout the various data models
• Optimal use of system resources
• Peace of mind in knowing the lifespan of your infrastructure
• More accurate budget planning
• Efficiency - you won’t buy hardware you don’t need
• Consistency across your entire environment
• Tracking the impact of changes to obtain ROI on changes
• Cost savings

5. Database Health Check & Audit

Database Health Checks provide a variety checkups to audit and make sure your database conditions are in order, security is good, overall performance is doing well, backups are reliable, high availability requirements are met and other key database checks and balances. Database health checks are very important to the stability, security and performance of your critical IT and database environment. Our comprehensive database audit and health check service covers all aspects of database management best practices as well as server configuration.

A comprehensive report covering 20 focal points is produced for our clients. Each finding is classified into critical, short term, medium term and long term recommendations.

Some of the major points covered are as below:

• Physical Database set-up.
• Logical Database set-up.
• Server Set-up and performance.
• Database backup and recoverability.
• Database management facilitation
• Database Security
• Segment status and condition style
• HA and DR implementations

Action item priorities will clearly be defined based on the health check results and formally presented to you. We will then discuss remediation and corrective action plans to get your database completely healthy.

Health check templates are used based on the collaboration and best practice methods of our senior DBAs and industry standards to provide you the most complete health check audit available.

6. Business Continuity Planning (Backup/ Recovery and process consulting)

Business continuity responds to the following questions:

• How critical is your data? How much downtime can you sustain?
• What are your recovery time targets and critical applications?
• What are your service level commitments?

Business continuity is developing a plan that is a comprehensive examination of all that could go wrong. It’s running periodic audits to see if your response time is adequate for your type of business. It’s understanding what your limits are and how fast you can move..

Backup and recovery is one of the most important aspects of database administration. If a database crashed and there was no way to recover it, the devastating results to a business could include lost data, lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction. Whether companies operate a single database or multiple databases storing hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data, they share one common factor - the need to back up important data and protect themselves from disaster by developing a backup and recovery plan.

The preparation, creation and testing of backup and recovery-related processes specific to the database, including:

• Backup & recovery process development
• Disaster recovery test preparation
• Disaster recovery scenarios testing
• Replication setup & administration

With decades of experience and the greatest concentration of database engineers anywhere, we know what can go wrong and have built best practices around these scenarios.  We prepare optimal Backup strategies to enable our clients to recover up to the point of failure.

Benefits:

• Peace of mind
• Known failover/recovery times
• Battle tested DR configurations
• Roadmap to improve your business continuity plan

7. Performance Tuning

Uclid ensures optimum performance of your small, large, OLTP, OLAP environments databases by following well planned systems and procedures required for each. We understand database specific requirements and apply the necessary performance tuning strategies for different databases. Operating system expertise helps us solve operating system bottlenecks that may affect database performance.

Regular maintenance tasks are done on a regular basis to ensure that databases perform at optimal levels. Some of the tasks involve rebuilding of indexes on a regular basis, tables de-fragmentation etc. We use Customized and Standard monitoring tools to constantly monitor the databases for any performance issues. Some of the tasks include

• Work in sync with the Application Development team to help in tuning of queries
• Constantly monitor site responses at the Client’s site and coordinate with the IT Operations Team to identify potential causes of failure.

Result-oriented Tuning

We aim to work as efficiently as possible to get you quick results. Generally, it takes from a few hours to a few days to diagnose and correct most performance problems. Following a set of best practices based on years of performance tuning and troubleshooting experience, we begin by developing an understanding of your needs and system issues. We then identify performance bottlenecks and wasted resources and recommend changes to improve performance. These recommendations are tested and a deployment plan is developed. Changes are implemented, and we work with you to monitor performance gains and continue to tune until your scalability and performance goals are met.

Recognized Experts

Our team of recognized industry leaders will analyze your system and work with your team to achieve the below benfits.

Benefits:

• Improve database performance and response time
• Minimize downtime and expenses
• Make the best use of current hardware and software
• Achieve your scalability and performance goals
• Reduce future risk of poor performance
• There's No Substitute for Experience