Tekmark Global Solutions

Tekmark Increases Network Availability with Completion of Technology and Infrastructure Upgrade at Red Bank Solutions Center

Tekmark® Global Solutions, LLC (Tekmark) recently completed a technology and infrastructure upgrade at its Red Bank, NJ Solutions Center. The upgrades deliver more bandwidth, an enhanced disaster recovery (DR) plan and provide for data back-up options. The major infrastructure investment enables Tekmark to grow exponentially while maintaining Tekmark's and clients' applications' performance, reliability and security. It also provides the foundation for several major product enhancements in the coming months.

The 25,000 sq. ft. Red Bank, NJ Solutions Center is a cost-effective, near-shore development center focusing on Quality Assurance, development and turn-key projects. Tekmark' s recent upgrades provide clients with a fully redundant state-of-the-art Solutions Center with full life cycle development, test and support capabilities. The Solutions Center is configured for Tier III facility use and managed by Tekmark's internal IT staff for all of Tekmark's and clients' enterprise needs. The center serves as a hosted facility for clients' co-location operations (application hosting, disaster recovery facility, backup services, etc.) as well as a development and operations center for Tekmark's applications and enterprise services.

"Upgrading our Solutions Center was a cornerstone in our strategy to position Tekmark for continued growth," commented Guy DelGrande, chief executive officer at Tekmark. "Both new and current clients will benefit from the major enhancements thanks to this upgraded infrastructure."

Clients seeking a third-party solution for their hosted operations or failover site can expect Tier III level support. Tekmark can provide low-cost hosting of multi-rack through single-server sized operations providing 24x7 support inclusive of hotline service, managed firewall protection and reporting, secured access, and remote administration.

Optional services include:

• Disaster Recovery support providing true four 9s availability through our offsite contracted failover supplier.
• Online backup and recovery services providing true four 9s availability through our contracted supplier for secure online data backup cost-effectively.

More than 100 internal and client servers are monitored and serviced 24x7, in both dedicated-use and shared-use configurations. Servers cover the range of Linux, UNIX, MS, and select other OS platforms. Our MVS platforms are hosted through a third-party partner offsite at a Tier IV facility. Tekmark also locally administers desktops and their associated applications for select financial services clients. Operations manage onsite active servers and offsite backup servers, UPS, chillers, local generators, and diverse-routed 100Mb interconnects to ensure full disaster recovery services to meet both Tekmark's and clients' SLAs.

Tekmark's secure access systems include multi-level proximity key card access, network passwords/logins for registered devices only, and CCTV surveillance system and routine backups (tapes and mirrored/compressed discs) of applications and databases (DB2, Informix, Oracle, PostGres, etc). The overall operation is linked to an in-house work management system for trouble ticket entry and tracking, supporting our internal users and our external clients.

Tekmark's redundant network access manages both the telephony and the data traffic with 1G/100M/10Mbps. The SSL-enabled firewall reduces manual VPN efforts. The network is redundant up to the curb access for the Red Bank Solutions Center and to our Tier IV failover supplier's facility. This ensures there is no single point of failure within the network to the curb; the Red Bank Solutions Center also employs diverse routed accesses from the curb to Tekmark's internal network equipment. Client sites can be served by this network as well, allowing the highest speed connection with the fewest handoffs for their users' access to their remote servers.

The Red Bank, NJ Solutions Center also serves as one of our Security Operations Centers (SOC) locations, meeting both the requirements of Network Operations Center (NOC) and SOC standards. Our staff maintain secure data services to our contracted clients throughout North America and offshore. The staff's expertise is pooled with that of our IT services group to enable both security service and WAN service administration skills across both domains. Expertise and certification in Cisco, Fortinet, SonicWall, and other vendors' equipment is maintained on the combined team. Network, router, switch, and firewall configuration and administration are all supported by this team, as well.