The IT world is somewhat like an iceberg. Behind the visible face of any internet system, office network,global corporation email network or just about anything IT related, sits a very large investment in infrastructure.
Every packet or chunk of information comes from a server somewhere and flows over a myriad of cables, switches, routers etc. before it gets to it's destination. Even just one poorly chosen cable can get in the way of that flow, and ruin your day, your productivity or your sales. Infrastructure is important! (IBM once ran commercials with the quote "Eventually infrastructure matters" under a picture of the leaning tower of Pisa - don't be dissilusioned that your infrastructure problems could one day improve your bottom line by becoming an amusing landmark!)
As indicated elsewhere on this website, pumptheory.com have significant experience in IT Infrastructure on a global corporation scale, and also from a SME point of view. We have experience covering a wide range of server hardware and software platforms as well as a significant range of networking hardware vendors and products. Below you will find a list of some of these along with skill levels.
Infrastructure is an area of IT that especially responds to careful planning. Like the foundations of a building, the quality and depth of your IT infrastructure will determine the limits of everything you build on top of it. And like building foundations, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to improve on them, without totally re-building.
We can help you with any or all stages of your infrastructure project. From strategy building where decisions on features, products and vendors are made, to project management through to procurement and deployment.
Of course no infrastructure should be left to "run itself", and all infrastructure projects would include planning for regular maintenance, trouble shooting etc. Depending on the quality of service required from the infrastructure (which would be determined during the project scoping stage), contingency planning would include items such as redundancy or quick-responce on-site replacement etc.
You will find a list of some of the products and toolkits we use in our infrastructure projects below.
Partners
In our complex IT world, it is often prudent to partner with firms that have complementary skillsets and capacities. We use our good working relations with many partner firms to bring the best mix of services to our clients.
EnterpriseDB provide a special purpose version of the PostgreSQL open source relational database, targeted at Oracle compatibility.
Announced at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, August 9, 2005, EnterpriseDB will provide sponsorship for further PostgreSQL development and release leadership, in addition to providing existing source code.
This is an excellent boost to PostgreSQL, already one of the best relational database management systems in the world as well as the most ANSI compliant.
Pumptheory.com uses and recommends PostgreSQL to it's clients and would like to welcome these investments by EnterpriseDB into the PostgreSQL community.
(Thank's to Solution Grove for alerting me to this press release.)
PostgreSQL began as Ingres in 1977 - you can read a short history of it's development here.
The newly formed .LRN (read dotLRN) Consortium has released it's first press release.
Members of a multi-university project on open source software for collaborative education today announced formation of the .LRN ("Dot-Learn") Consortium to accelerate and expand development of an open source application suite currently used by a quarter million students and educators at institutions of higher education and research around the globe.
The .LRN Project encompasses an ongoing 10-year development effort and represents the world's largest open source project for scalable educational software. Built on the OpenACS project, .LRN applications originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and enhancements from the past several years have been deployed by the MIT Sloan School of Management as SloanSpace -- its primary means of providing class management and community support. At present, SloanSpace hosts more than 10,000 student and faculty users, amounting to 1,250+ unique logins per day.
Along with the MIT Sloan School, charter members of the .LRN Consortium include Heidelberg University, The European Union-funded E-Lane Project and the University of Sydney.
Thank's to Rafael Calvo (Web Engineering Group, The University of Sydney), pumptheory.com's Mark Aufflick recently presented a series of Software Engineering lectures.
The slide sets and related research materials are now available online:
Workflows - An overview of workflows including Petri Nets and Finite State Machines
OpenACS Workflow - An overview of implementing a finite state machine workflow with the OpenACS workflow package
