Server and infrastructure management in El Paso

TechBit Solutions monitors, patches, documents and plans the replacement of the servers, storage and power equipment El Paso businesses run on, so hardware becomes a budget line instead of an emergency.

Call (915) 629-8888

What this covers

TechBit Solutions looks after the equipment your business runs on: physical and virtual servers, storage, backup hardware, uninterruptible power supplies, and the operating systems on top of them.

This is the layer most staff never see and everything else depends on.

Who it is for

• A business with one or more servers and nobody whose job it is to watch them
• A company that inherited a setup from a previous provider and has no documentation
• An office where the server is in a cupboard with the cleaning supplies and no cooling
• A business that needs to know what its hardware will cost to replace and when

What is included

• Monitoring of disk, memory, processor, temperature and hardware health, with alerts that reach a person
• Operating system patching on a schedule agreed with you, tested before it goes wide
• Virtualization host management and capacity planning
• Storage monitoring, because a full disk takes down more servers than any attack
• The databases running on them, where that is part of the agreement
• Backup hardware checked, and restores actually performed
• Uninterruptible power supply battery checks, which almost nobody does until the power cut
• A written asset register: what you own, when it was bought, when the warranty ends
• A replacement schedule with costs, so hardware is a budget line rather than an emergency

Hardware that is past its life

Equipment does not fail politely at a convenient moment. It fails on the busiest morning of the quarter, and the cost is rarely the part.

Once a server is out of warranty you are relying on how quickly somebody can source a matching component. For a five-year-old machine that can be days. Meanwhile whatever it was running is not running.

We keep a list of what is approaching that line and roughly what replacement costs, so the conversation happens in a planning meeting rather than during an outage.

The problem it solves

Servers are quiet right up until they are not. Without monitoring, the first sign of a failing disk is usually a member of staff saying the system is slow, which is several weeks after the point where it could have been swapped over a lunch break.

The second problem is knowledge. When the setup is undocumented, every change is a small risk and the business is dependent on whoever last touched it.

How it works

1. We inventory and document what exists, including the things nobody mentioned.
2. We put monitoring on everything and set alert thresholds that mean something.
3. We agree a patching window and stick to it.
4. We check backups by restoring from them on a schedule.
5. We review the asset register with you once a year and tell you what is coming.

Where the equipment actually lives

A surprising amount of server trouble in El Paso is environmental rather than technical. Heat is the main one. A cupboard that is comfortable in February is well above the safe operating range by June, and equipment run hot fails years earlier than equipment run cool.

When we take on a site we check the room as well as the hardware: temperature, airflow, whether the door is ever propped open, whether the uninterruptible power supply is carrying more than it was sized for, and whether anything is stacked on top of a vent. These are cheap problems to fix and expensive ones to ignore.

We also check who can physically reach the equipment. A server anyone can unplug while looking for a socket is a risk no amount of monitoring covers.

Getting started

The inventory comes first and takes a few days. See also cloud services and network infrastructure.

Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.

Questions we get asked

How do we know when a server needs replacing?

Warranty expiry is the honest trigger. Past that point a failed part means waiting for whatever a supplier can dig up rather than a next-day replacement. Age matters far less than whether you can still get support and parts when you need them.

Can you manage servers you did not install?

Yes, and that is the usual situation. We document what is there before we take it on, because accepting responsibility for something nobody ever wrote down is precisely how outages happen.

Should we replace the server or move to the cloud?

It depends what runs on it. We price both and show you the three-year cost of each side by side. Sometimes the answer is neither, and the right move is to keep it running one more year while something more urgent gets fixed first. We will tell you when that is the case.

What is virtualization?

Running several separate servers as software on one physical machine. Fewer boxes to look after, and a failed machine can be brought back on different hardware in minutes instead of being rebuilt from scratch over a weekend.

Do you do this after hours?

Yes. Anything that restarts a server or interrupts your people is scheduled outside your working hours. We are in El Paso rather than another time zone, so after hours means yours, and your team should not lose a morning to our maintenance.