This post will explain an importance of a proactive support and also gives you few examples. We'll talk about 5 Reasons to get a Proactive Support. First, we'll talk about the reasons which make proactive support attractive those days and then we'll look at an example of proactive support at StarWind software which does exactly that.
You might ask why StarWind? Well, It's no secret that we like their products, the same way as we like products from VMware, Veeam, or Microsoft. We've written about StarWind products for about a decade and followed their transformation from a pure software company into a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) vendor space.
We write about StarWind but this could be any other company as well. We're evolving within the IT HyperSpace through learning, watching and this proactive support is something which is interesting especially when you think of high availability of applications, services, and data.
5 Reasons to get a Proactive Support
01 – Prevention is always better than cure. This is exactly what you get in a proactive IT support model. Your IT support team or IT provider prevents potential technical issues before they become a problem. But how does this compare to the more traditional reactive IT support approach?
A traditional support isn't that fast to react. It's always “one step behind” if you know what I mean. It's up to the client to call the support when something happens. When storage is down when a host is down when a NIC driver triggers Purple screen of death (PSOD). So the client has to take the action in order for the problem to be solved.
02 – Effective decision making. Proactive IT support gives your business the insights needed for effective planning and analysis to improve your current IT processes. With IT health dashboards and reporting on a regular basis, IT managed services companies providing proactive IT support can help you gain full visibility into your current IT system without much effort from your side.
03 – Cost Savings. We can see some similarity with for example a car industry. Because just like fixing your car when it breaks down. It can be more expensive than just getting the oil changed regularly. When you operate using a reactive approach to IT support, you run the risk of having to spend more to fix something that is “broken.”
04 – Frequent Health Checks. Your IT vendor can easily identify areas of vulnerability and fix them. Remember that those guys do that all the day long. Managed IT services with proactive support and monitoring equip IT support teams with automatic alerts whenever there is a potential issue or maintenance need.
05 – Disaster Recovery (DR) – If there is some kind of disaster (fire, flood or ransomware attack), a proactive system is usually better prepared and more reactive to respond with DR procedures. It's because managed IT support plans are usually bundled with remote backup and DR plans in order to assure critical data of your company to be safe in those situations.
The traditional support case usually looks like this:
As you can see, there is a plenty of steps which you, as an end user, have to go through. Sometimes it involves third-party vendors (for example when troubleshooting driver or firmware versions and support levels). Each vendor plays “ping-pong” blaming each other. Have you experienced that? If you're in the IT business for some time, I think that you did.
Anyway. The situation can take days to be resolved. The traditional support looks like on the image below.
How is that process handled at StarWind?
StarWind has much simpler “support chain” compared to traditional support. StarWind monitors the infrastructure without waiting for issues to happen. If an issue is identified, the engineers resolve it without the need for customer's presence. And if it involves to reach out to a third-party vendor, its StarWind engineers who reach to this third-party vendor (it can be Mellanox, Microsoft, VMware… etc).
Concerning security. You don't have to worry about your sensitive data as StarWind has no need for it. No sensitive information is transmitted. StarWind has no benefit in.
Quote:
While traditional support services require a lot of different stages to resolve an issue, StarWind ProActive Support simplifies the support chain and completely removes time and efforts involved from the customer’s side. StarWind ProActive Support delivers significant benefits and resolves issues before they even occur, allowing customers to focus on innovation instead of monitoring their environment.
To give you an idea how it works, look at the graphics below showing the whole process, from start to finish.
StarWind saves your and your company's:
- Time – you don't have to notify StarWind or other vendors you might have in your environment. It's StarWind who handles remotely everything. It contacts other vendors (if necessary) to for example troubleshoot driver's issues etc.
- Money – your time costs a lot of money. You'd spend considerable time to troubleshoot the environment. Time which you would rather spend on something else (learning, family, building other parts of your infrastructure…)
- Effort – you would need to put a lot of effort into troubleshooting if you'd have to resolve issues by yourself.
Video:
Wrap Up:
Troubleshooting is no fun. I know. Whether you're working as an IT admin for the end user or for a larger customer, you find yourself in a position that you do not know the solution and you rely on a resolution by third-party provider or vendor. Getting a proactive support is, at the end of the day, only a better way to assure your company's application availability.
The support guys do troubleshooting all the day long so you can be sure that they know their stuff. You can be specialized in virtualization or just general IT admin, and still, you might not even get close to finding a solution for your environment as the IT is evolving every day.
There is often a new hardware release, new drivers and (or) new software releases pretty often. Everything is evolving pretty fast so to keep up to date with all this might be difficult when at the same time you have to assure support for internal users within your company. Proactive support can be a way for less painful IT life, after all. What do you think?
Proactive support is included in StarWind HCI solution. For StarWind Virtual SAN it is an “add-on”.
Check StarWind Proactive Support Page.
More from ESX Virtualization:
- 2 Nodes 10GbE Switch-Less Configs from Starwind
- StarWind Virtual SAN Free vs Paid New Offer for 2017
- What is iSER And Why You Should Care?
- StarWind Virtual SAN 2-Node Tips and Requirements
- StarWind Hybrid Cloud For Microsoft Azure
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