On the enterprise consulting front, Obsidian believes that its customers should have access to hardware and software solutions that have both been proven in enterprise IT environments, and benefit from service and support mechanisms vendors have put in place to specifically address customers concerns with regards to risk aversion.

When it comes to new implementations, Obsidian is capable of assisting its customers in the areas of:

• Choosing an appropriate hardware platform that meets their need in terms of cost, performance, fault tolerance and resilience (incorporating high-availability solutions from Stratus and clustered solutions from a host of other vendors);
• Assistance with the design, integration and maintenance of a storage solutions (on both traditional Fibre SAN and iSCSI SAN);
• Matching that hardware platform with an appropriate open source operating system (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Cluster Suite for fault tolerance or high-performance);
  Setting up a virtualised server environments, using technologies such as Xen and KVM;
• Fleshing these environment out with applications, database solutions and environments that include JBoss, MySQL, EnterpriseDB (PostgreSQL) and other complementary solutions;
• and Integrating open source solutions with existing, non-open source IT environments and migrating proprietary operating systems instances to Linux where appropriate.

The company is obviously also well versed in offering its customers outsourced, remote or on-site management of customers’ IT environments. Techniques here include:

• Constantly monitoring Linux system logs and administrative alerts;
• Applying all required software updates;
• Periodic diagnostic examination of the hardware and fine-tuning configurations to ensure systems perform optimally and remain stable;

and

• The implementation of an ‘installation server’ which is populated with third party software and used to easily provision new servers or perform disaster recovery.

Other offerings Obsidian makes available to customers include:

• Pre-project consulting and solution component recommendation;
• Solution component auditing and compiling a compatibility matrices;
• Knowledge transfer and hands-on training;
• Experienced advice on Linux best practices;
• Ensuring that the Linux environment is properly implemented, optimised and connected to support systems (such as the Red Hat Network).