Remote Database Administration

We Protect Your Data

Aspect Consulting provides on-site or completely remote managed database administration services designed to reduce your expenditures, while optimizing your company’s database environment.

While reducing IT expenses is certainly attractive, our Database Administration Services offer more than just cost cutting.

Our Senior Level DBAs will be available to you 24 hours each day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. No vacations or sick days to cover; no system failures due to mistakes made by inexperienced administrators, and no communication barriers.

Capabilities

Remote Database Monitoring
Database State of Health Checks
Database Administration Support
Database Server Migrations
RDBMS Software Installations and Upgrades
Database Platform Migrations

Oracle to SQL Server
Oracle to MySQL
Oracle to PostgreSQL

Backup and Recovery
Performance Tuning
Server Consolidation

Database State of Health Check

How is Your Database Performing?

A State of Health Check is an in-depth, comprehensive audit of SQL Server databases across an environment, informing you of your environment’s configuration, backup ability, performance, security, stability, and the current state of licensing. Performing an audit quickly and comprehensively is key.

Knowledge is power, and proactively determining what is causing problems, what is about to cause problems, and what is functioning at an optimal level puts you in the driver’s seat, letting you provide a smart road map for future improvements.

Top Reasons to Perform a State of Health check Audit:

A Departure: A DBA departs and takes key knowledge of the state of the environment with them.
An Addition or New Support Team: A New DBA joins the organization or a new administration team is added that requires a quick, comprehensive picture of the health of the environment.
A Fresh Perspective: The organization would like a new perspective on the health of the environment. Since there are multiple ways to fix a problem, a fresh perspective might bring new information to the table for remediating a stubborn issue, or proactively uncovering a hidden issue.
New Management: A “changing of the guard” occurs in management and you need to quickly collect and provide cross-environment information.

Featured Success Stories

Remote Database Administration Cuts Costs

The client’s CIO was charged with a key initiative of reducing the costs associated with database maintenance. The company needed a solid, experienced DBA to provide continuous support without absorbing the cost of full-time employment, benefits, vacations to cover, or the risk of managing the highturnover previously encountered with in-house DBA resources.

After comparing proposals, the client was impressed with Aspect’s flexible approach to support: remote daily monitoring of the entire database environments and support services provided when needed. The client gained continuous monitoring for peace of mind and on demand professional support at a cost that was less than a full-time resource. Aspect was able to reduce the company’s administration costs by 35%, allowing the client to refocus those savings on mission critical projects.

Environment Stability Achieved at an Affordable Price

After years of expansion, the client, a leading healthcare company in the US, needed to take greater steps to ensure that critical data was protected and access to its application servers was not interrupted. After experiencing high DBA turnover, optimizing administration efforts was also at the top of the IT director’s list.

Aspect was engaged to stabilize the client’s environment. Aspect was able reduce the number of servers within the environment by 20%,. Monitoring ensures that missed backups, downed servers, failed jobs, and out of range disk space or file size growth can no longer occur without alerting support staff.

Database Consolidation Effort Optimizes Environment

With multiple business units and frequent mergers, the client’s database server environment had undergone unchecked growth, and operational costs had ballooned in tandem with the growth of the environment.

Aspect collected key metrics to detect underutilized servers, and was able reduce the number of servers within the environment by 25%, leveraging savings by reducing licensing costs and energy consumption. In addition, the reduction in database servers and instances resulted in less administrative overhead, reducing operational costs further.

Remote Monitoring

Monitoring of Your Entire Database Environment

We utilize our custom monitoring suite comprised of Watchdog DB Monitor, Centralized Disk Management System (CDMS), and Job Auditor to monitor and protect your data.

Watchdog is a flexible centralized monitoring utility that detects and communicates error conditions within your database environment that standard infrastructure monitoring tools cannot detect, or cannot do well. With Watchdog, we know if

Databases are up
Disk or file space usage is about to be exceeded
Performance degradations occur
Missed backups occur

CDMS continually gathers and sends disk space information to WatchDog. With CDMS, our experts can trend disk space consumption over time, and then set disk space alert thresholds that trigger warnings within Watchdog, so you never run out of space.

Job Auditor takes notification monitoring to the next level, mining large volumes of notifications to detect both failed processes AND missed processes that failed to complete. A single email a day summarized notifications, so that no critical alerts are missed or buried in an inbox.

Read more about our Database Monitoring Suite Here.

Expertise

Service Summaries

Remote Database Administration Services
Database State of Health Check
Database Server Consolidation Services

Database Infrastructure Assessment Services

Application Backup and Recovery Validation Services

Database Monitoring Suite