Advice Managed IT services

[Bob007]

Coming from a sys admin back ground, I have very little knowledge of this. Apart from Google of course. Here is what I can share of a sort of background.

We are owned by a parent company, who own some other companies. Anyway, Other company X has a requirement for some Managed IT Services. Isn't hard to find a few if you google em, but they have a current provider who i would consider to be way below what I would call a good IT provider. No 24/7 support, seemingly trial and error stab in the dark kind of aproach to things that I know should be planned out before hand. No real grasp on what their own IT structure is. I could tell you some horror stories, but I am going off topic.

So I have been asked to find some prospective IT providers that can supply private "cloud" based, fully managed IT solutions with 24/7/365 support based in the UK.

Now I know a lot of you really nice folks are also IT minded, so am hoping some of you may have had dealing with something like this before and with that I am hoping you could recommend a good company you have dealt with before or one to aviod due to a bad experiance.

By Managed i do mean managed. Patching on a regular basis, managed network, firewalls, client and site to site VPN's with full logging and reporting, technical staff who know their on kit and network.

Sorry, I know this isn't a lot to go on. But it's all I can share.

 

[old.user4556]

Cloud

 

[old.Osy]

I have had first hand experience with HP Managed Services - and they rock. Expensive, but they have skilled people, and the infra / resources to never let you down.

Very procedural, but that's something to look to, when going for this kind of service.

*Do not ever consider HCL

 

[SilverHood]

I have had first hand experience with HP Managed Services - and they rock. Expensive, but they have skilled people, and the infra / resources to never let you down.

Very procedural, but that's something to look to, when going for this kind of service.

*Do not ever consider HCL

I deal with our IT infrastructure teams on a daily basis. HCL, HP, Oracle, TCS, Laser... They all provide a relatively poor L1 and L2 experience when you have an urgent issue. For non urgent stuff they are all pretty decent, though they will make you raise endless amounts of tickets. HCL and TCS tend to have better experts when you have that mystery issue, as their experienced guys have been around a long time. As for managing servers, patching and maintenance, HP and Oracle both do a fairly decent job of our infrastructure stack. Our issues tend be that our hardware is 10-15 years old, can't be fixed without investment. That said, our company is moving more towards fully managed HP services, where they will own the hardware, with a private cloud for virtual unix machines. Hardware upgrades etc are priced into the support model, so that issue will go away eventually, and the only thing we will own will be some of our latency dependent applications.

 

[old.Osy]

I deal with our IT infrastructure teams on a daily basis. HCL, HP, Oracle, TCS, Laser... They all provide a relatively poor L1 and L2 experience when you have an urgent issue. For non urgent stuff they are all pretty decent, though they will make you raise endless amounts of tickets. HCL and TCS tend to have better experts when you have that mystery issue, as their experienced guys have been around a long time. As for managing servers, patching and maintenance, HP and Oracle both do a fairly decent job of our infrastructure stack. Our issues tend be that our hardware is 10-15 years old, can't be fixed without investment. That said, our company is moving more towards fully managed HP services, where they will own the hardware, with a private cloud for virtual unix machines. Hardware upgrades etc are priced into the support model, so that issue will go away eventually, and the only thing we will own will be some of our latency dependent applications.

I agree with the poor L1 & L2 support comment, although in my experience the HP personnel outshine HCL at every corner. At least the HP engineers could speak english. God forbid you'd go into a tech bridge with HCL people - I'd rather take a blowtorch to my nuts than do that.

HP have been nothing but professional and efficient for us, from the beginning until the last VM was migrated off their premises.

HCL for us was a cost driven choice, which everyone regrets - but hey, that's what happens when the organization rests these decisions on the P&L performance. The CIO who took us to HCL no longer works for us.

 

[old.user4556]

I didn't find HCL too bad but I guess it really depends on needs and requirements. The biggest problem about our Indian partners is the rotation every 11 months - you bring them onshore, they get a lot of hands on face to face knowledge, then they bugger off in search of another career. The turnover of staff kills it.

Wipro on the other hand, yeeeesssht. Terrible.

 

[Wij]

How big is your company?

Will you manage on purely cloud infrastructure or do you want some CoLo managed too?

Do you want them to manage your end-user compute and/or small-office networking or just back-end?

Do you use SaaS offerings such as Office365 or Google Apps?

Do you want to transfer support of legacy apps?

Do you want them to write and support new software or would you source that elsewhere?

 

[Bob007]

Thanks all for the replies so far.

I have HP on the list, i dismissed HCL and Cloud early on in my searches, but if theres a reason for mentioning cloud I would be happy to put them back. Problem I have always had with HP is the initial setup. Once you are up and running it's great. Maybe thats just me.

How big is your company?

800 - 1200 staff depending on time of year. 14 UK locations, a couple of others in the EU.

Will you manage on purely cloud infrastructure or do you want some CoLo managed too?

Pivate cloud based only

Do you want them to manage your end-user compute and/or small-office networking or just back-end?

This will be managed by another party.

Do you use SaaS offerings such as Office365 or Google Apps?

O365, Will just need to support AD sync for single sign on via AD proxy.

Do you want to transfer support of legacy apps?

Nope. Will be server support. MS/Linux. Plus some Firewall (Cisco, 2fa) requirements.

Do you want them to write and support new software or would you source that elsewhere?

Sourced else where

 

[Bob007]

Do you want them to manage your end-user compute and/or small-office networking or just back-end?

Sorry should expand more on this answer.

Clients and client networks will be managed by a third party at all locations. With some undecided link between sites and server farm (site to site VPN best guess right now, but may change as this evolves)

This will be purely for server management and controlled access and will contain about 30 servers. Mainly MS Windows Server but some will need to be Linux based, Debian/Ubuntu boxes.

 

[Wij]

ControlCircle?

 

[Wij]

Also are you running an RFP?

 

[SilverHood]

I didn't find HCL too bad but I guess it really depends on needs and requirements. The biggest problem about our Indian partners is the rotation every 11 months - you bring them onshore, they get a lot of hands on face to face knowledge, then they bugger off in search of another career. The turnover of staff kills it.

Wipro on the other hand, yeeeesssht. Terrible.

Ah man, I had this discussion with very senior people in my company at a networking event not long ago. If you train people from offshore, you need to pay them what their skills are worth, or they'll move to a different project at a higher pay. We had a succession of on shore people over the last 10 years... Super technical, highly motivated, they came over making $30-40k a year, and after a year could easily get $60-70k. Three years in and they could ask for $90k or more. Why anyone expected them to still work for $40k I dunno.

We had an agreement with a vendor where we paid them something 2 million euros a year, and they had to monitor our batches and infrastructure 24/7. Three 8 hour shifts of 3-4 people could do it easily. What happened is that we had 1-2 senior people in each shift, 2-3 mid level people and 6-12 juniors, with a total team size ranging from 28 to 42. The juniors were fresh faced new graduates or people with little experience of working in large multinational corporations. They did the worst of the grunt work and rarely interacted with anyone outside their team. The mid level guys were there to assist the on site support teams in whatever we needed. The senior guys and girls were there to guide everyone else and pick up bigger issues. Our offshore team was basically a massive training operation for the vendor, and if they had expensive people sitting on the bench, they could always throw them our way. If they were any good, we'd get them on site fairly quickly. If not, they added an impressive client to their CV, upped their daily rate and moved on.

While it wasn't a great model, it worked for us most of the time. We always had competent people looking after our stuff. We had a ready supply of potential on site staff that knew our systems. For them, there was clear advancement, with the dream being to work with an on site team in one of our four major HQ's. Then we brought it all in house, realised that paying for people in 1st world countries was too expensive, and outsourced it all again, this time to a different vendor for half the cost. Now we have the problem of people leaving as soon as they get comfortable. Of the 14 people I trained a year ago, I think 3 of them are still there. At least they do their own training for new starters. You get what you pay for

 

[Bob007]

I have put Alternative Networks on the list. I have a few now and will be speaking with the Group IT boss type today.

Also are you running an RFP?

Intresting, I hadn't considered this, it might be a good way to go and could save me some grunt work.
Thanks

And one again, thanks all for your comments.

 

[Tay]

And RFP could save you a lot of hassle but its not that easy running them, lots of time and effort to pull one together.

I'm running a Global WAN RFP now and it'll take the better part of 4-6months to complete.

There is so much work, the best bit is that if you do an RFI (request for Info) then you can take a big list of provider down to a much more manageable list, there is always the worry that somebody that gets excluded at the RFI stage could actually have the best solution, and by toning it down a bit they could meet a certain price point.

There are so many variables with what you have said thus far its almost impossible glean what might be right for you.

But don't get suckered into the cloud just because thats what lots do it isn't for everybody, understand the costs for both Colocation and cloud/managed.

We've had our gear in Colo in a tier 1 and tier 2 DC's for the last 5-6 years. We have taken Back up as a service, Software as a service, its our kit in colo facilities, we currently have intelligent hands for the changes we need, and we manage the network infrastructure ourselves.

We're talking with the Following for the WAN & to a lesser degree hosting, Tata, GTT, CDW, Sungard, Level 3, AT&T, Century link the list goes on.. We're even looking at Google for compute , its so scaleable we could never offer that. This is just another model instead of self hosting, or colo etc.

If your looking for site interconnects then seriously consider SD Wan technologies, its not bleeding edge anymore and putting in big fuck off ISP circuit is way cheaper than looking at the likes of MPLS or having to manage (or somebody else to manage) your firewalls, some of the providers can even do dynamic path selection over multiple ISP's or 3g/4g etc.. some even say you can do VoIP too. Cloud based orchestrators rock and the cost model is so compelling you'd be mad not to

Looking to see how this one pans out for you

 

[Moriath]

Surely hp are running cloud by now. Or they are behind the times. Cloud seems to be a big thing to dismiss when there are a lot of providers supplying it. Amazon cloud, microsoft azure, oracle cloud.