Remex Consulting’s experiences cover a vast array of Information and Communication Technology subsystems. Our expertise is in bringing them together as robust, reliable and cost effective solutions to business challenges.

Our clients regularly benefit from our expertise in the following areas:

• Local Area Networks (“LAN”) and Virtual LAN (“VLAN”) implementations
• Wide Area Networks (“WAN”) including private line, MPLS and VPN implementations
• Internet Connectivity, whether through our wholly-owned ISP or utilising off the shelf products and services
• SIP Telephony and Voice Over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”)
• Server Implementations including Virtualisation and Cloud
  (be warned, our thoughts on Cloud are likely to be quite different to what you’ve experienced elsewhere)

If we do not know something, we will tell you as much. We will never pretend to have knowledge when we do not.

 

Local Area Networks

Far too many IT “experts” believe that the local area network is of little importance to an overall solution. This belief could not be more wrong. The local area network is arguably the single most important component of a well integrated system. It is the foundation of the entire system and can impact or be impacted by all components of the system.

You wouldn’t start to build your brick home
until you had first laid the appropriate foundation

In order to properly design a local area network, or any network for that matter, it is crucial to first understand the services and applications that the network must support. For example, it would be inappropriate to share an unconfigured NBN connection between SIP telephony and a large data streaming application, as the two applications will invariably interfere with each other. Whilst this may not be obvious to network clients using the data streaming application, it will be very noticeable to clients making a telephone call as the quality of that call would be severely and adversely affected.

Most networks are intended to support many applications. Most applications have particular behavioural characteristics. It is important to understand the applications and their characteristics in order to design and implement suitable network. Of equal importance is understanding the intended or likely future characteristics of the applications, which will help to ensure that any design decisions are future-proof.

The key fundamental of good network design is to ensure that bottlenecks do not adversely affect the performance or capacity of the overall system.

Remex has more than two decades of experience in designing, implementing, supporting and evolving networks that meet our client’s requirements.

 

Wide Area Networks

By definition, a wide area network is a network that interconnects multiple local area networks using wholly private communications technologies. The evolution of the Internet or, more to the point, of the internal networks of Internet service providers has delivered options for wide area networks that have made them increasingly more affordable. Leased line, frame relay and ATM remain appropriate for many organisation’s wide area networking requirements, while many are considering MPLS and virtual private networking implementations in order to achieve significant cost savings.

Like any network, however, a wide area network must serve the purpose for which it is intended. Typical business intentions might include reducing equipment such as servers, centralising applications such as email, or facilitating unmetered voice calls between campuses. And so, when designing a wide area network, or any network for that matter, it is crucial to first understand the services and applications that the network must support. For example, it would be inappropriate to schedule over an unconfigured wide area network network a daily backup of a remote file server if that network was also intended to deliver a business application, because the backup would severely impact the performance of the business application.

Most networks are intended to support many applications. Most applications have particular behavioural characteristics. It is important to understand the applications and their characteristics in order to design and implement suitable network. Of equal importance is understanding the intended or likely future characteristics of the applications, which will help to ensure that any design decisions are future-proof.

The key fundamental of good network design is to ensure that bottlenecks do not adversely affect the performance or capacity of the overall system. Good wide area network design gives particular consideration to the network and transport layers of the OSI Model and TCP and UDP protocols.

Remex has more than two decades of experience in designing, implementing, supporting and evolving networks that meet our client’s requirements.

 

Internet Solutions

“Not all internet connections are equal” is a mantra we use when talking about internet connections. Performance and reliability are paramount for business Internet connections ... and we focus only on business connections, we steer well clear of residential connections.

We are able to provide customers with NBN connections (but very much prefer not to, because we don’t want our good reputation to be adversely impacted by technical issues that are completely beyond our control).

Our preference, wherever possible, is to supply ethernet-based internet solutions (because they have much less tendency to break without a good reason).

We don’t own our own fibre, but we do have wholesale access to various large telcos and can supply high quality, very high speed internet connections at very reasonable prices. And for only $150 per month, we can add a fully managed commercial Internet firewall to keep you secure.

 

Telephony Solutions

With the NBN rollout really picking up pace now, it won’t be too long before everyone currently using PSTN or ISDN telephone lines will need to make the move to SIP telephony, also know as voice over IP (“VoIP”).

Making that change is often presented as an opportunity to save money and, if it were always as simple as changing the type of telephone line you’re using, you almost definitely would save money. But it’s usually a bit more complicated than just changing the type of telephone line.

• you may need to change your actual telephone system or, at minimum, will likely need to upgrade it
• you may need to upgrade your Internet connection or install an Internet connection specifically to run the telephones
• depending on the critical nature of telephony for your business, you may need to have redundancy in connections so that you can still make and receive calls in the event that your internet goes down
• and that last point might mean that you also need to run BGP routing, if you need to be really serious about redundancy

We have experience with all levels of SIP telephony and VoIP telephone systems and will be happy to explain the ins and outs of each approach.

 

Server Solutions : On-premises, Virtualisation and Cloud

As has been the case since computers were first deployed in business environments, the Cloud is just another approach to solving the same old challenge.

You would be forgiven for believing that challenge is “How do we get the best value for money?” because that’s exactly how the software vendors have positioned their Cloud offerings and they have and will continue to spend their huge marketing budgets to keep reinforcing that message.

But the reality, in almost all circumstances, is that the Cloud is more expensive than On-premises implementations. The reality is that the Cloud is intended to solve the software vendors’ challenge “How do we increase our revenues?”

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 taught us all something (though it seems we’ve all started to forget). We learned that it was simply not necessary to upgrade to the latest versions of every bit of software and to upgrade to the newest and fasted personal computer each 3-4 years. We learned this because most of us reduced our spending in areas that were perceived to be non-critical to the business (ie Marketing and IT) while we waited to see how long it would take for the world’s economy to perk up.

In the server room, most of Remex’s clients’ infrastructure survived for 8-12 years.

If you compare the cost of even the most basic Cloud offering (Microsoft’s Office365) to the equivalent On-premises implementation and plan to upgrade applications and infrastructure each 8 years, you’ll see that you would be miles ahead.

If you’d like us to do the calculations for you, peculiar to your specific systems, give us a call.