Servers, Cloud and Data Centre

Server sizing, virtualisation and backup architecture planned together, with power, cooling and rack layout coordinated from day one.

A data centre cold aisle at night, tall server racks receding on both sides with status LEDs across the front bezels, overhead cable trays and perforated floor tiles.
Server, storage and continuity reference architectureBusiness workloads run as virtual machines across clustered hosts sharing common storage. A backup system takes copies on a defined schedule, and a copy is held off-site or in cloud so a site-level failure is recoverable. Racks are supported by UPS and environmental control, and the estate is documented so capacity and refresh can be planned.ON-SITE RACKOff-siteHOST 1Virtual workloadsHOST 2Cluster peerUPSPower and coolingSHARED STORAGECapacity and tiersBACKUPScheduled copiesCLOUD / DROff-site copyRUNBOOKRestore procedure

Reference system

Workload, server or virtualisation, storage, backup, cloud and users shown in one resilience diagram.

Symptoms

When this matters

If any of these describe your environment, this is the conversation to have.

  1. 01Server hardware is ageing past warranty with no replacement plan in place.
  2. 02Backups run, but nobody has verified a test restore in the last year.
  3. 03The server room has no UPS plan, or cooling was never sized for the load.
  4. 04Hybrid cloud access exists but was configured without a documented architecture.
  5. 05Directory services and file permissions have grown unmanaged over time.

Scope

What KINNEX delivers

Compute and storage decisions are made alongside the physical constraints they depend on — power, cooling and rack space — rather than treating the facility as someone else’s problem. KINNEX plans servers, backup and the room they sit in as one system.

  • Server sizing, procurement, deployment and migration.
  • Virtualisation, directory services, file services, storage and permissions.
  • Backup architecture, recovery objectives, test restores and documentation.
  • Rack, power, UPS, cooling and physical-layout coordination.
  • Cloud connectivity, hybrid access, monitoring and lifecycle planning.

Capability catalogue

Everything this covers

132 capabilities, scoped, sourced and delivered under one contract. Search for the exact term you use.

Servers and compute13

Sized from workload, not from a price list, with the support and firmware discipline to keep them running.

  • Rack, tower, blade and edge servers
  • Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC and Arm-based platforms
  • GPU servers and workstations for AI, ML and rendering
  • CPU, memory, I/O and storage sizing from workload analysis
  • ECC memory, redundant power supplies and dual-port networking
  • Out-of-band management: iDRAC, iLO, XClarity and IPMI
  • Hardware RAID, HBA and NVMe, SAS and SATA configurations
  • Windows Server, Red Hat, Ubuntu and SUSE licensing
  • Core-based licensing, CALs and SQL Server licence advisory
  • OEM support contracts: 4-hour, next-business-day and on-site
  • Firmware, BIOS and driver baselines
  • Server refresh, migration and secure decommissioning with data wipe
  • Performance baselining and capacity forecasts
Virtualisation, hyperconverged and containers11
  • VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox and KVM
  • Hyperconverged infrastructure: vSAN, Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix
  • High availability, live migration and resource scheduling
  • P2V and V2V migration with minimal downtime
  • Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): Horizon, Citrix, Azure Virtual Desktop
  • Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and Rancher
  • OpenStack private cloud
  • Capacity planning and VM right-sizing
  • Virtualisation licence review and optimisation
  • Templates, automation and orchestration
  • VM sprawl clean-up and lifecycle governance
Storage14
  • Direct-attached (DAS), NAS and SAN storage
  • Synology, QNAP, NetApp, Dell, HPE, Pure and Hitachi platforms
  • Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NVMe-over-Fabrics
  • All-flash, hybrid and archive tiers
  • S3-compatible object storage: MinIO, Ceph and cloud buckets
  • Snapshots, clones and replication
  • Deduplication, compression and thin provisioning
  • RAID 1, 5, 6, 10 and erasure coding
  • Tape libraries (LTO) for long-term retention
  • WORM and object-lock for compliance retention
  • File services: SMB, NFS, DFS and quotas
  • Storage migration and consolidation
  • IOPS, latency and throughput performance design
  • Hybrid cloud tiering of cold data
Backup and recovery18

Designed around how much data you can lose and how long you can be down, then tested until it is boring.

  • 3-2-1 and 3-2-1-1-0 backup architecture
  • Backup policy design: GFS retention, full, incremental, differential and synthetic full
  • Image-level VM backup and agent-based physical backup
  • Application-aware backup: SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle, SAP, Active Directory
  • NAS backup and NDMP
  • SaaS backup for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce
  • Endpoint and laptop backup
  • Immutable backups with object lock or WORM
  • Air-gapped and offline copies on tape or isolated storage
  • Offsite and cloud tiers with encryption in transit and at rest
  • Automated backup verification and restore testing
  • RPO and RTO definition by application tier
  • Retention schedules: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly
  • Legal hold and e-discovery retention
  • Ransomware recovery and clean-room restores
  • Backup-server hardening, MFA and four-eyes deletion
  • Capacity forecasting, alerting and reporting
  • Recovery runbooks and drill reports
Disaster recovery and business continuity12
  • DR strategy: cold, warm and hot site and active-active designs
  • Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
  • Replication: synchronous and asynchronous
  • Failover and failback orchestration
  • Network, DNS and identity failover
  • DR site selection and geographic separation
  • Application tiering for recovery priority
  • DR testing: tabletop, partial and full failover
  • Business impact analysis (BIA) and business continuity plans (ISO 22301)
  • Crisis-communication and call-tree templates
  • Colocation and private-cloud DR sites
  • Regulator-aligned DR documentation for banking and finance
Cloud: strategy, migration and operations16

Public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud, with the cost and governance discipline that keeps the bill honest.

  • AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud and Alibaba Cloud
  • Indian cloud and colocation providers
  • Cloud readiness assessment and business case
  • Landing zones and cloud foundation design
  • Migration waves: rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, retain
  • Lift-and-shift, database and SAP migrations
  • Cloud networking: VPC, VNet, peering, VPN, Direct Connect and ExpressRoute
  • Cloud identity, access and governance
  • FinOps: right-sizing, reservations, savings plans, tagging, budgets and showback
  • Managed cloud operations: monitoring, patching, backup and cost review
  • Containers and managed Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE)
  • Infrastructure as code: Terraform, Bicep and CloudFormation
  • Cloud-native backup and disaster recovery
  • Data residency and sovereignty planning
  • SaaS migration and tenant consolidation
  • Private-cloud and edge deployments
Data centre and server-room facility20

Power, cooling, space and safety designed together, to recognised data-centre standards.

  • Server-room and data-centre design aligned to TIA-942 and Uptime tier concepts
  • Site selection, load calculation and white-space planning
  • 42U and 47U racks, hot and cold aisle containment
  • Raised-floor and overhead cabling, trays and fibre routes
  • Precision cooling: CRAC, CRAH, in-row, rear-door and liquid cooling
  • Airflow analysis and cooling capacity planning, PUE tracking
  • Online double-conversion and modular UPS, N+1 and 2N designs
  • VRLA and lithium-ion battery systems
  • Metered, switched and intelligent PDUs
  • Generators, ATS and STS, dual A and B power feeds
  • Earthing, surge protection and power monitoring
  • Temperature, humidity and water-leak monitoring
  • Early-warning smoke detection and clean-agent fire suppression
  • Access control, CCTV and visitor logging for the facility
  • DCIM and capacity management
  • Civil, fire-rated partitions and false-ceiling works
  • Modular, containerised and micro data centres
  • Commissioning, load-bank and integrated systems testing
  • Data-centre migration and relocation
  • Server-room readiness audit
Databases and enterprise platforms10
  • SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB
  • Clustering and high availability: Always On, RAC and replication
  • Database backup, patching and performance tuning
  • Database migration to cloud and licence optimisation
  • Active Directory design, hardening and disaster recovery
  • Exchange and on-premises email infrastructure
  • File, print, DNS, DHCP and WSUS services
  • Remote desktop services and application publishing
  • Web and application servers: IIS, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat
  • ERP and accounting hosting, including SAP HANA infrastructure
Operations, monitoring and lifecycle10
  • Server, storage and virtualisation monitoring
  • Log management and capacity trending
  • Patch management with WSUS, Intune, Ansible or equivalent
  • Configuration management and automation
  • Warranty, firmware-compliance and licence-compliance tracking
  • Hardware refresh and end-of-life planning
  • Critical spares and OEM back-to-back support
  • Quarterly health checks and annual DR drill
  • 24x7 or business-hours operations under SOP and SLA
  • Capacity and growth roadmap
Securing the server estate8
  • Server hardening to CIS Benchmarks
  • Privileged access management and session recording
  • EDR and workload protection on servers
  • Network segmentation between server tiers
  • TPM, Secure Boot and disk encryption
  • Vulnerability scanning and patch cadence
  • Backup immutability and ransomware isolation
  • Log forwarding to SIEM

The site, in 3D

Compute, cooling and connectivity that stay up

Data halls, cooling plant, diverse fibre entries and a tested path to cloud and disaster recovery.

  • Data halls
  • Cooling plant
  • Diverse fibre
  • Cloud and DR

Real-time 3D illustration of a typical site, not a specific client project.

Use cases

Where this shows up

Typical situations that lead an organisation to this work.

01

Ageing server hardware nearing end of warranty that needs a replacement and migration plan.

02

A business virtualising physical servers to reduce hardware footprint and improve resilience.

03

A server room that has never had its power, cooling or UPS capacity formally reviewed.

Delivery method

How the work runs

Architecture before equipment. Validation before handover.

  1. Stage 01 of 6

    Assess

    Current workload, storage, backup and server-room readiness review.

  2. Stage 02 of 6

    Design

    Sizing, virtualisation architecture, backup and recovery objectives.

  3. Stage 03 of 6

    Implement

    Deployment, migration, rack and power coordination.

  4. Stage 04 of 6

    Validate

    Test restores, failover checks and performance verification.

  5. Stage 05 of 6

    Document

    Resilience diagram, backup schedule and recovery runbook.

  6. Stage 06 of 6

    Support

    Monitoring, capacity planning and lifecycle refresh scheduling.

How we take this on

One contract. The right specialist for every part

Your project is wider than any single team. We scope all of it, source all of it and carry the responsibility for all of it.

  1. 01

    Scope

    We survey, size and specify against standards and your operating reality, not against a brochure.

  2. 02

    Source

    Any make, any model, from the manufacturer, distribution or registered importers. GST-compliant invoicing, warranty and returns handled for you.

  3. 03

    Deliver

    KINNEX engineers do the work we do every day. Where a job needs a specialist, we bring in the right expert team as a sub-order under your single contract.

  4. 04

    Own

    One scope, one SOP, one SLA and one point of accountability, whoever is on site.

Standards and terms

Standards we design to, and the terms you will hear

Specifications are written against recognised standards. Here is the vocabulary, in plain language.

  • TIA-942 (data-centre infrastructure)
  • Uptime Institute tier concepts (aligned design)
  • EN 50600 and ANSI/BICSI 002
  • ASHRAE TC 9.9 thermal guidelines
  • ISO/IEC 30134-2 (PUE)
  • NFPA 75, 76 and 2001 (fire protection)
  • IEC 62040 (UPS)
  • ISO 22301 (business continuity)
  • ISO/IEC 27031 (ICT continuity)
  • NIST SP 800-34 (contingency planning)
  • ISO/IEC 27001 aligned operating practices
  • 3-2-1 and 3-2-1-1-0 backup rules
  • ITIL 4 service management
RPO and RTO
Recovery point objective: how much recent data you can afford to lose. Recovery time objective: how long you can afford to be down. Together they decide the design.
3-2-1-1-0
Three copies, on two kinds of media, one offsite, one immutable or offline, and zero errors proven by test restores.
Immutable backup
A backup that cannot be changed or deleted for a set time, even by an administrator. It defeats ransomware.
Air gap
A copy kept disconnected from the network, such as tape, so an attacker cannot reach it.
GFS retention
Grandfather-father-son: a layered schedule of daily, weekly and monthly backups kept for different periods.
Hot, warm and cold DR site
How ready a standby site is: running and synchronised, prepared but idle, or empty space to be built out after a disaster.
DRaaS
Disaster recovery as a service: replicating workloads to a provider that can run them if your site fails.
HCI
Hyperconverged infrastructure: compute, storage and networking combined in one scale-out cluster.
Live migration
Moving a running virtual machine between hosts with no downtime, for maintenance or balancing.
NAS vs SAN
NAS shares files over the network. SAN gives servers raw block storage over a dedicated fabric.
IOPS
Input and output operations per second: a measure of how many small reads and writes storage can handle.
N+1 and 2N
Redundancy levels: one spare unit beyond what is needed, or a full duplicate of the entire system.
PUE
Power usage effectiveness: total facility power divided by IT power. Closer to 1 is more efficient.
Hot and cold aisle containment
Physically separating cool supply air from hot exhaust so cooling is not wasted.
Double-conversion UPS
A UPS that continuously rebuilds clean power from batteries, isolating equipment from mains disturbances.
ATS and STS
Automatic and static transfer switches that move load between power sources, in seconds or in milliseconds.
FinOps
The practice of managing cloud spend: measuring it, right-sizing, committing to discounts and assigning costs to owners.
Landing zone
A pre-configured, governed cloud environment (accounts, networks, identity, logging) that workloads are migrated into.
SOP and SLA
The documented procedures for operating the estate, and the response and restoration targets agreed for it.

Brands

Any make. Sourced, supplied and supported

We specify against your requirement and standards, then source the right product from the manufacturer, distribution or registered importers. Delivered, installed and supported under one contract.

Servers, storage and data-centre compute

Rack, tower and edge servers, SAN, NAS, all-flash and tape.

  • Dell Technologies
  • HPE
  • Lenovo
  • Cisco UCS
  • Supermicro
  • Fujitsu
  • IBM
  • Huawei
  • Inspur
  • NetApp
  • Pure Storage
  • Synology
  • QNAP
  • Western Digital
  • Seagate
  • Hitachi Vantara
  • TrueNAS
  • Toshiba
Show 24 more brands
  • Intel
  • AMD
  • NVIDIA
  • Samsung
  • Micron
  • Dell EMC
  • HP
  • ASUS
  • Gigabyte
  • Wiwynn
  • Marvell
  • Broadcom
  • Arm
  • SK hynix
  • Kioxia
  • SanDisk
  • Transcend
  • Quantum
  • Asustor
  • Kingston
  • Crucial
  • Nimble Storage
  • Mellanox
  • Ampere

Virtualisation, backup and disaster recovery

Hypervisors, hyper-converged, backup, replication and ransomware recovery.

  • VMware
  • Nutanix
  • Red Hat
  • Proxmox
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Citrix
  • Veeam
  • Veritas
  • Acronis
  • Commvault
  • Rubrik
  • Cohesity
  • Druva
  • Arcserve
  • Synology
  • QNAP
  • Dell PowerProtect
  • HPE StoreOnce
Show 24 more brands
  • Barracuda Networks
  • Backblaze
  • Wasabi
  • Datto
  • MinIO
  • Ceph
  • TrueNAS
  • OpenStack
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Portainer
  • Rancher
  • SUSE
  • Canonical
  • Oracle VirtualBox
  • Zerto
  • NAKIVO
  • Storj
  • Unitrends
  • Altaro
  • Carbonite
  • Cove Data Protection
  • Cloudian
  • KVM

Cloud and hosting

Public cloud, Indian data-centre providers, hosting and colocation.

  • Amazon Web Services
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud
  • Oracle Cloud
  • IBM Cloud
  • Alibaba Cloud
  • DigitalOcean
  • Hostinger
  • GoDaddy
  • Cloudflare
  • Vultr
  • Hetzner
  • Bharti Airtel
  • Jio Cloud
  • Rackspace
  • Equinix
  • E2E Networks
  • Yotta
Show 12 more brands
  • CtrlS
  • Sify
  • Tata Communications
  • NxtGen
  • Linode
  • OVHcloud
  • Netmagic
  • STT GDC
  • AdaniConneX
  • Nxtra
  • Web Werks
  • Pi Datacenters

Power, cooling, racks and data-centre facility

UPS, batteries, PDUs, precision cooling, racks and monitoring.

  • APC
  • Schneider Electric
  • Vertiv
  • Rittal
  • Exide
  • Cummins
  • Kirloskar
  • Stulz
  • Liebert
  • ABB
  • Siemens
  • Hitachi Hi-Rel
  • Havells
  • Tripp Lite
  • Kohler
  • Caterpillar
  • Perkins
  • Eaton
Show 24 more brands
  • Delta Electronics
  • Legrand
  • Netrack
  • Valrack
  • Raritan
  • Socomec
  • Riello
  • Numeric
  • Luminous
  • Microtek
  • Amara Raja
  • Mahindra Powerol
  • Panduit
  • Emerson
  • Su-Kam
  • Livguard
  • Okaya
  • CyberPower
  • Centiel
  • Piller
  • Ashok Leyland
  • Server Technology
  • Sensaphone
  • AKCP

Product names, logos and brands are property of their respective owners and are used for identification only. Don't see what you need? We can usually source it, including through registered importers.Ask us.

Technology fit

The technology categories this work draws on.

  • Enterprise server and virtualisation platforms
  • Directory and file-services infrastructure
  • Backup and disaster-recovery software
  • UPS, rack and cooling coordination

Questions

Frequently asked questions

From current and near-term workload — user count, application demand and growth headroom — rather than defaulting to the largest available configuration.

A backup is only proven once it has been restored. KINNEX designs a test-restore schedule as part of the backup architecture, not as an afterthought.

In most cases migration can be planned in a maintenance window with a tested rollback path, minimising disruption rather than eliminating it entirely.

Power capacity, UPS runtime, cooling load and rack space are reviewed against the planned hardware before anything is installed.

Where relevant, yes — cloud connectivity and access are designed as part of the same architecture rather than bolted on separately.

Plan your server or data-centre requirement

Tell us the site, the constraint or the outcome you need, and we will come back with the right next step.