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

Reference system
Symptoms
When this matters
If any of these describe your environment, this is the conversation to have.
- 01Server hardware is ageing past warranty with no replacement plan in place.
- 02Backups run, but nobody has verified a test restore in the last year.
- 03The server room has no UPS plan, or cooling was never sized for the load.
- 04Hybrid cloud access exists but was configured without a documented architecture.
- 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.
132 capabilities
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
Nothing listed under that term yet. If you need it, ask: we can usually source or deliver it through a specialist team. Tell us what you need.
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.
Stage 01 of 6
Assess
Current workload, storage, backup and server-room readiness review.
Stage 02 of 6
Design
Sizing, virtualisation architecture, backup and recovery objectives.
Stage 03 of 6
Implement
Deployment, migration, rack and power coordination.
Stage 04 of 6
Validate
Test restores, failover checks and performance verification.
Stage 05 of 6
Document
Resilience diagram, backup schedule and recovery runbook.
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.
- 01
Scope
We survey, size and specify against standards and your operating reality, not against a brochure.
- 02
Source
Any make, any model, from the manufacturer, distribution or registered importers. GST-compliant invoicing, warranty and returns handled for you.
- 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.
- 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
Reading
Related insights
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
A one-page business continuity plan for a small office
Power, internet, devices, data and people. What to write down so an outage is an inconvenience, not a crisis.
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
Data centre tiers explained: what Tier II, III and IV mean for you
Redundancy levels describe design, not guarantees. How to read a tier claim and match it to the workload you are placing.
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
Hyper-converged or traditional SAN: choosing storage for a mid-size estate
Hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies scaling, a SAN offers flexibility. The trade-offs, and the cases where neither is needed.
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
On-premises, virtualised or cloud: where should a workload live?
Cost, control, latency, compliance and skills. A balanced look at hosting servers in your office, a data centre or a public cloud.
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
RPO and RTO: the two numbers that decide your backup and DR design
How much data can you lose, and how long can you be down? Answer these for each system and the technology choices become straightforward.
Servers, Cloud and Data Centre
The 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule and what it means in practice
Three copies, two media, one off-site, one offline or immutable, zero errors after testing. How to turn the slogan into a design.
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.


