Technical Consulting

Ainger Technologies' Inc.'s industry leading experts, who include IBM Gold Card holders and other certifications, provide consulting assistance in virtually any area, or combination of environments or multi-platform technologies. This allows a synergistic approach when more than one associate is involved in a project. Areas of expertise include, but are not limited to:

Capacity Planning [top]

The proliferation of processing platforms and the distribution of applications across these platforms has made Capacity Planning increasingly difficult, and consequently a business and technical discipline that receives less and less attention. Meanwhile the importance of the IT processing infrastructure meeting business objectives increases.

At Ainger Technologies our Capacity Planning experts understand the Capacity Planning process. We can tailor your capacity planning processes to meet your business and technical requirements as well as your user's needs.

If your capacity planners cannot answer most of your questions about current load-to-forecast variance, or simple "what if" questions, within an hour, you should be talking to us about reviewing your current Capacity Planning processes.

Performance Monitoring and Tuning [top]

By tuning the performance of installed hardware and software, significant cost savings can be realized while improving service delivery. Significant elongations of processor life are common, as are DASD capacity utilization improvements of 20% or more, thereby reducing overall costs while improving overall service to your clients and customers.

As more and more of your day-to-day interactions with your customers is through online transactions rather than face-to-face contact, the importance of the transaction’s service time is their primary measure of your service delivery.

Enterprise Data Storage Management [top]

Data is a critical corporate asset that frequently receives much less time, attention and consideration than its relative importance should dictate. From the mainframe to the PCs, data is a vital corporate asset, and a key element in meeting business and information processing objectives.

Ainger Technologies can help you meet your business' data storage and data storage management requirements in a cost-effective manner that meets your organization's business, data processing and information availability requirements.

Storage management audits cover all aspects of your storage environment, from live-cycle management, through performance, availability and capacity utilization, to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity to assure that your company receives the best possible return on your data storage investment while assuring that your data, and your business, are protected from a disaster or lost data incident.

We also specialize in data migrations. Our experience with IBM's PPRC, EMC's SRDF, Amdahl's TDMF, STK's Power PPRC and other migration methodologies can expedite your migration while ensuring its successful completion.

Operating Systems Support and Administration for Mainframe And Distributed Environments [top]

Today's challenges often include the lack of appropriate IT resources to support your existing technical needs. Long and short-term staff shortages, redeployment of essential staff and inexperience, results in the inability to deliver the required service levels for your clients. As changes in technology escalate, experience is often lacking to maintain and support your essential legacy systems.

Ainger Technologies can provide expertise in operating system support and administration of VM, VSE, OS 390, z/OS, Windows NT and UNIX environments. Our system consulting solutions will increase your company's productivity, efficiency and staff utilization.

These supplemental IT support services provide staffing flexibility or technical breadth to your organization and include:

CICS and Message Queuing Services [top]

As more CICS/VSAM and legacy batch applications are converted to CICS/MQSeries/DBMS (primarily CICS/DB2) we see our client's experiencing unexpected system stress and an inability to complete online transactions and related batch processes within acceptable times.

Tuning of CICS, MQSeries and the DBMS(s) have become increasingly important to meeting service and business objectives. Ainger and Associates Inc. are recognized industry experts in CICS, Message Queuing and database management. This means that tuning efforts are concluded more expeditiously, and skills transfer is assured.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity [top]

Ainger Technologies can provide expert consulting services for Disaster Recovery Planning, Business Continuity Planning, and High Availability computing. The cost of business interruptions can be devastating to an enterprise and, if an interruption lasts too long it can threaten the enterprise's existence.

The loss of, or inability to recover, mission-critical data can also have disastrous repercussions throughout the corporation. Most businesses have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place for raised floor data. These often-inefficient procedures frequently overlook the fact that information processing has become an integrated process that has spread far beyond the raised floor. Business Continuity Planning is now seen by many businesses as a mandatory extension of Disaster Recovery Planning.

We understand the importance of integrating the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity processes, rather than treating them in isolation, if they are considered at all.

A sound disaster recovery / business continuity plan is essential to protect the well-being, stability and continuity of your organization.

Working with your organization, we can provide the creation of a new process that meets your organization's needs, or update the existing plans.

Network Consulting [top]

Clients, vendors, business partners, staff, systems, applications and data are all interconnected by you network. Nothing else singularly affects as much of your ability to conduct business. Ainger Technologies's consultants have the experience to review your current SNA/LAN/WAN/SAN/VPN implementations and recommend (and implement) improvements, to maximize your infrastructure investment.

It does not matter whether you have one or two locations, or a single small office, today's computer networks are comprised of a vast, complex array of software, firmware, hardware, transmission protocols, and data transportation mediums. It is difficult for a company to have the comprehensive in-house skills required to evaluate business needs and recommend, implement and manage the entire network world.

For environments comprised of S/390 servers, distributed platforms, desktop or a combination of all three, our consulting services can include activities such as:

Many organizations view Security as the vehicle for ensuring that unauthorized access to data is denied. The result is often the delay or denial of services or data to those who have a valid business requirement for access.

An effective combination of risk management and security can be a means of business enablement. Ensuring that those who require access to data and other facilities help create business opportunities to use information technology in ways that might not otherwise be feasible.

Ainger Technologies offers a complete suite of security, audit and assistance services across all processing platforms, tailored to suit your needs.

Current and Future Technology Directions [top]

As an independent consulting service, we will provide software and/or hardware solutions based on your company's needs. We will recommend a solution that will protect your current and future investments. This means not just solving your immediate need, but designing a solution that will continue to meet your needs next month, next year, and beyond.

Education [top]

Courses, hands-on training and skills transfer, customized to your needs are available for most Information Technology subjects. Customized to your processing environments, presented onsite, using your systems and applications, these courses allow your staff to learn the subject(s) in a way that directly applicable to your environments.

Recent courses include:

Virtual Staffing [top]

Knowledgeable and experienced senior technical staff is very expensive. Considerably more expensive than you may realize.

During the average week, month or year, how much of their time is actually spent utilizing their knowledge and experience to their potential?

Many of our clients take advantage of our "Virtual Staffing" services. Our senior associates bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to your operation. They understand their contribution to your business objectives.

The two major advantages are:

1. The contract resource only works when scheduled or requested. If there is no work to be done, or problems to be resolved, then there is no cost to you. Solutions selected by our clients range near-full-time to one day per week to several hours per month.

2. The experience and knowledge brought to your operation will result in work being done accurately, professionally and quickly. Problems are rapidly resolved.

The result is your having your technical staffing position(s) filled by very senior technical resources, often at a considerable savings to your operation.

Ainger Technologies can also provide one of several levels of on-call support services if required.

Summary [top]

The breadth and depth of our professionals will bring to your organization the expert skills to meet your exacting requirements and ensure that your team is positioned to meet the challenges each and every day.