Systems that Arces supports must meet and maintain minimum standards in order to be eligible for support.  Doing so helps us keep your environment running the best it possibly can and makes it easier to provide proactive maintenance services without concern for the age of the system or software introducing additional risk.  As part of our Managed Services offering, we keep systems and applications current, providing upgrades and maintenance within the current major revision.  Software which requires an upgrade to the next major revision (such as moving from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008) will be executed as a project, after which we will continue to support the system or application as part of your Managed Services agreement.

If a system doesn't meet our minimum standards prior to beginning our relationship, we'll identify it as part of an implementation project to bring all of the systems up to date.  Throughout the management of the system we'll work to keep it current. Environnmental factors, such as the requirements of a custom application, might prevent a system from being updated to the current base.  In such a case the system will still be supported at time and materials rates until it can be brought up to current standards.

Basic Requirements

• Server hardware is less than three years old.
• Network hardware is less than five years old.
• All hardware holds a current support contract from the manufacturer.
• The operating system and supported applications are listed as software Arces supports.
• The OS and all software installed on the system are legal and licensed.
• Office and datacenter environments have an edge firewall device from the list of devices Arces supports.
• All systems that contain unique data have a copy of that data backed up with a disaster recovery copy stored offsite.
• All servers contain a configured remote access device (HP ILO, Dell DRAC, external IP KVM) that contains, at the minimum, the ability to remotely power-cycle the system.

High Availability

• Systems identified as performing critical functionality exist in a high availability configuration, either as part of an active/passive cluster or a load balanced group of systems with redundant data.
• Datacenter edge network devices are redundant.

Linux Servers

• Physical systems are built with Linux Volume Management (LVM) and have a minimum of 10% of disk space available for snapshots.  LVM is optional on virtualized systems, but if configured, will also have 10% of space available for snapshots.
• All systems have a minimum of 2x RAM in swap space, up to a maximum of 1G under standard configurations.
• Interface numbering on systems begins with 0.

Windows Servers

• Windows servers have a current antivirus software package installed.
• Office environments run Active Directory.

Windows Desktops

• Windows desktops have a current antivirus software package installed.
• Desktop users do not have Administrator privileges.