At TCPWave, we have professional and courteous engineers with vast experience and expertise in analyzing, troubleshooting, resolving, and designing efficient DDI ecosystems. The talent and the expertise at TCPWave Professional Services are the best in today's industry. Since each customer's design and deployment strategies are different and no two customer deployments are the same, TCPWave does not believe in a one-size-fits-all solution.
Our professional team has performed large-scale migrations involving millions of IP addresses with zero downtime to the mission-critical DNS and DHCP infrastructure. We have also successfully orchestrated numerous smaller and medium-sized DDI infrastructure migrations. We start by designing and developing a proven and repetitive migration framework that produces the results and metrics of each migration stage. These metrics are stored, and a report is generated automatically after the execution of the business logic.
The migration strategy and the framework used for each customer's conversion and migration are altered to suit the unique business requirements of each customer. We work with our customers to ensure that the migrations are performed successfully during their network green zone. After the migration, we provide that the DDI infrastructure is stable, scalable, resilient, and monitored, exceeding the customer's expectations. We custom tailor integrations using the TCPWave REST API framework. Our depth of knowledge in Cloud Network automation, Terraform, Ansible playbooks, OpenShift, Python, Node.js, Java, etc., is unsurpassed in the industry. TCPWave is widely acclaimed for not using a plain text password in API automation. This is a very significant information security factor to deploy automation involving the mission-critical DDI infrastructure of any organization. This page provides a bird's eye view of our onboarding, migration, post-migration, and professional services and support.
Large and medium organization-grade migrations may include service plans where the customer obtains access to a dedicated TAM (Technical Account Manager). The primary purpose of the TAM is to ensure that you get the most out of TCPWave's product suite. The TAM would also assist in performance tuning, ensuring that proper information security practices are enforced, identify the tactical and strategic automation objectives, serve as a liaison between the customer and the product development team, exchange best practices, and ensure that the DDI deployment is operational 24x7.
At TCPWave, we listen and think before giving out any solution. We have fine-tuned our migrations by learning from various past migrations. We first understand the existing design, the current challenges, the present design defects, and limitations. We then go back to our drawing board and have a brainstorming session wherein experts evaluate various design options and settings. Upon successfully identifying an optimal migration and design strategy, the plan is presented to the customer. The plan is broken down into granular tasks and milestones. The priority of any migration is to ensure no downtime when a cutover takes place to the TCPWave DDI remotes. Weekly calls are scheduled to ensure that a global task force is informed and aligned to perform the migration. The TAM will publish weekly meeting minutes that can also be seen on the customer portal PDF.
Although the responsive and progressive user interface of the TCPWave IPAM is designed to make complex tasks appear pretty simple, TCPWave strongly recommends the customer's network engineers, shift supervisors, and network operators to create a portal-based training session. In these training sessions, a set of professional TCPWave trainers walk the students through the product's user interface, demonstrate how trivial tasks are performed, how troubleshooting is done, and how to maintain and manage a seamlessly smooth core DDI infrastructure. Each UI screen has a help screen that assists the users in understanding the purpose of that screen.
The TCPWave IPAM is shipped with Swagger API Documentation, Administrator's Guide, REST API guide, Quick start guide, and a CLI guide. The customer portal from TCPWave also has a self-service section where the customers can search the knowledgebase and familiarize themselves with the past resolutions suggested by the TCPWave professional services team. TCPWave's resource center is also a helpful place where the users can browse through the video archives to learn about the different aspects of the TCPWave IPAM. The GitHub repository that provides sample Python, Node.js, and Java code is another place where the users can download sample code and experiment with the automation capabilities.
Customer migrations can be classified into many categories. For a customer that uses spreadsheets, the TCPWave IPAM provides a simple user interface to import the spreadsheets and migrate them to the TCPWave IPAM using a DIY(Do it Yourself) wizard. A phased approach is followed for larger deployments where the legacy design and deployments are complex to ensure a smooth migration. There could be instances where a portion of the DNS and the DHCP infrastructure is migrated to the TCPWave IPAM while another part is still on the legacy infrastructure for a few weeks. There could also be instances where all the DNS infrastructure is migrated to the TCPWave IPAM while the DHCP services are still being performed on the legacy infrastructure. TCPWave creates a framework of tools that ensures a migration without any data omission with each migration strategy. Every forward and reverse DNS resource record, every DHCP scope, and the options present in each scope are validated by comparing the configurations between the legacy DDI versus the current TCPWave DDI.
TCPWave always ensures that the DNS zone data sent to the authoritative remote DNS appliances are free of any human errors. IF ANY, the A to CNAME conflicts are identified and resolved in the pre-migration dry runs. Stale subnets that no longer exist on the network are also removed with the customer's approval to reduce the data footprint. The appropriate split and merge operations are done during the pre-migration dry runs to ensure that the subnets defined in the TCPWave IPAM match with the live network. A parallel TCPWave remote infrastructure can also be erected where an IP swap is done to cutover the DNS and DHCP services in a phased approach. TCPWave has expertise in creating a customized polling engine that polls the legacy DDI manager and keeps the TCPWave IPAM up to date so that a phased migration can be performed seamlessly. The framework used by the TCPWave Professional Services team uses the TCPWave REST API calls. After each step of the phased migration, the monitoring alerts present in the TCPWave IPAM, the intuitive charts, and the configuration assurance checks provide valuable insight into the overall stability of the DDI infrastructure. This toolset is pivotal to providing an all-clear after each step of the pre-engineered migration strategy.
After a customer's migration is complete, the TAM and the TCPWave DevOps team meet with the customer's DevOps team so that areas of network automation are identified. The engineering leads of the DevOps teams would then determine how to improve the time taken to add, modify, and delete DNS records and DHCP scopes. The optimizations and business reviews, potential areas of improvement, etc., are discussed in these meetings. Various integrations such as SIEM integration (designing automation of trivial DDI tasks using ServiceNow), VMWare vRA automation, OpenShift automation using Ansible playbooks, Terraform automation, Cloud integrations with AWS Lambda, Azure, and Google, management of Cloud DNS providers such as Dyn DNS, Akamai and Neustar are presented.
The satisfaction of our customers by seeing the TCPWave IPAM integrate successfully with various automation frameworks, provide a DDI system in which change propagation delays are minimal or none, a secure framework with well-written documentation, a professional-grade DDI that mitigates and resolves all the legacy DDI pitfalls are some of the aspects that make every member of TCPWave shine in pride. To ensure that the infrastructure is stable, the TAM conducts weekly calls initially. These calls will eventually become monthly and quarterly calls.
