At Host Ventura we take support serious. Being in the business for over a decade, we have seen first hand what customers value in support. Being kept on the line and explaining their issue more than once and to several support agents is not one of them. This is why we offer you 'first-call resolution'. The person who receives your support request will manage the incident through completion and this around the clock.

Host Ventura operate a 24/7/365 on-site and off-site shift leader system supported by a multi-level escalation process up to director level.

For example; it is 10pm in the evening and your developers in the US are experiencing an issue with their sandbox, our shifts comprise a minimum of 2 staff covering server support and network operations. All on call network and specialist technical staff have secure remote access to the core Host Ventura infrastructure which allows them to access all managed systems and at any given time.

Our engineers are experts in every field they operate in and with pride we like to state that we only hire the best. Our HR hiring policy is unrelenting, including independent reviewing. We guarantee you’ll get to talk to true experts meaning you resolve any problems with the people who built your environment, not an unqualified call centre in a foreign country taking your call and passing it on the next morning. Instead we guarantee that only these people manage your systems all day, every day.

Key Advantages:

•    First-call resolution; incidents are managed through completion.
•    24/7/365 support backed by a multi-level escalation process
•    Only the best in the business are hired to manage your environment.

Patch Management - Most of our customers require 99.99% or greater uptime for their hosted infrastructure. This requirement leaves one with 1 hour (or less) allowable downtime per year for any reason, making unscheduled patching out of the question. Other customers may require patching activities at several sites, with a large number of units at each site, making a quick response difficult.

Companies like Microsoft and RedHat release software updates and patches to their operating systems on a monthly basis. Installing such patches ensures that your server solution remains up-to-date to fix potential software bugs, software vulnerabilities, operating system vulnerabilities, and server performance issues. Patching servers takes time and usually requires a reboot of the server. To help take the load off our customers, Host Ventura offers a patch management solution. As part of this solution, we will test all new updates and patches that are released in a testing environment. Once adequate testing is performed, the change control process is being initiated such that the updates and patches will be applied to your server and your server will be rebooted (if so required) during the agreed maintenance window.

We also give you the option of re-scheduling the patches if the normal maintenance window is inconvenient. Notifications of such activities are sent approximately one week before the patches are performed as a reminder.

Change Control - is used for identifying and maintaining changes. The Change Control Procedure is a process of creating a formal method for identifying, documenting, evaluating, and communicating all changes. Our Change Request Form is a formal document where the requester describes the changes that need to be applied to the system.  The form records the required change as well as recommended changes and estimated time of making the change.

The Change Request Log provides a register of all previous changes (versions).

The flow of Change control procedure is as follows:

1.    Submit request for change
2.    Estimate effort to evaluate change request
3.    Determine whether change request should be evaluated
4.    Analyze change request
5.    Assess need for escalation
6.    Make implementation decision
7.    Execution and documentation

Key Advantages:

•    No ad-hoc changes with uncertain outcome.
•    Evaluation and impact analysis.
•    Maximum communication and transparency in the change control process
•    Fully documented changes and processes in place.

Data Storage - The secure storage of your business data is critically important to your business. However, having an in-house storage solution can be expensive and difficult to maintain and support. If your business depends on high-throughput activities such as data mining or heavy database activities, you need the reliability and scalability of our managed storage solution.

Our managed storage solution is a customizable Storage Area Network (SAN) that gives you 100% availability of your data with multiple levels of redundancy. Your storage solution resembles a hardware RAID  with hot-swappable hard drives and redundant processors, host bus adapters, power supplies, and network switches and thus eliminating single points of failure.

Storing your data on our SAN (HP Storage Works) is an affordable yet highly adaptable means to scalable data storage. With flexible data passage between servers and storage systems, your access and speed of data transfer will never be compromised and easily scales with the growth of your business.

Key Advantages:

•    Storing your data remotely (disaster recovery)
•    No hardware to purchase, support and maintain
•    A fixed monthly fee
•    24/7/365 supported by Host Ventura SAN Experts

Managed Backup - From natural disasters to malicious attacks or plain human error, there will always be the risk of data loss, which is why you need data protection that ensures your business continues to run without critical downtime or devastating losses in revenue.

With your data volume ever increasing and backup windows decreasing, you require a larger, more sophisticated backup infrastructure to manage such demands. Host Ventura manages the entire solution from initial setup and configuration, monitoring to configuration changes.

Tape Backup - Full or incremental data backups to enterprise grade libraries ensure the integrity of the backup and can be stored in an off-site vault for maximum security indefinitely until you need them.

SAN Backup - Data backups can be stored and maintained for days, weeks or months from the date of the backup, providing you with archived data readily accessible. All backups are made to our state of the art SAN solution, ensuring reliable and quick backups readily available for when you need them.

Host Ventura can implement and manage backups for you that will greatly reduce your risk and help restore your important data quickly when most needed.

Key Advantages:

•    Efficient backup and recovery processes
•    Enterprise grade reliability and availability
•    Compatible with Linux and Windows
•    Secure (encrypted) data transfer
•    Lower bandwidth consumption
•    Secure off-site storage

Hardware Service is performed after a potential hardware failure has been identified by the HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM). This may be by an on-site engineer or an HP Technician, depending on the type of failure, equipment in use and the SLA that is in place for the failing device.

Due to redundancy, most hardware replacements should require no down time and can be executed accompanied by the 'minor change' process in order to guarantee full restoration of redundancy.

Storage Systems generally require more in-depth troubleshooting and a service request/case will be initiated with HP such that the failure or reported error is properly and effectively evaluated and resolved.

Although most changes may have no or little impact on the performance, there are of course cases where different measurements have to be taken either because the failure is causing a disruption in service or downtime is needed to replace the faulty part.

Regardless the impact of the change, The flow of Change control procedure is as follows:

1.    Submit request for change
2.    Estimate effort to evaluate change request
3.    Determine whether change request should be evaluated
4.    Analyze change request
5.    Assess need for escalation
6.    Make implementation decision
7.    Execution and documentation

Key advantages:

•    24/7 Hardware monitoring.
•    No or little downtime by efficient planning.
•    Certified engineers handle your incident.
•    Fully documented process under change control.