Do you live, breathe, and sleep Linux?  If so, then one of our Linux positions may be right for you.  We have two different Linux roles and are looking to add multiple people into both of these roles:

Linux Technical Engineer

Technical Specialist

If you’re not so Linux inclined you might be interest in working on our Microsoft team.  Are you a guru in Microsoft technologies?  You might be interested in the opportunity below.  We are looking to add multiple rock stars in this role:

Windows Technical Engineer

Do you have experience in technology sales?  Then we just might have a great career opportunity for you as well.  We are currently searching for top-notch technology sales professionals to join our sales team:

Technology Sales Associate

Apply today by visiting our Careers page.  We can’t wait to hear from you.

We are pleased to announce the addition of Matt Steiner to the Backup and Recovery team here at Contegix! In his previous roles, Matt has been responsible for providing comprehensive computer services, onsite and remote technical support and system administration of Linux/UNIX and Windows servers. Matt graduated from the University of Missouri, where he studied Information Technology. Welcome aboard, Matt!

In his latest piece, ‘Welcome to the Hyper Wars,’ Sreedhar Kajeepeta explains that this disruption is driving a need for multihypervisor environment and management tools that will work with several hypervisors to allow businesses to harness the latest innovation of multiplicity. Additionally Kajeepeta explains, “If you can make a strong case for multiple hypervisors, budget for a hypervisor neutral management console that has support for unified security, backup, disaster recovery, and load balancing and related migration of VMs.”

At Contegix, this disruption was not MiraCloud^TM. Our desire to design a product that would enable our customers to decide for themselves which solution best suits their unique work loads – all inside one unified infrastructure for added convenience and freedom of choice – was prompted by their expressed desire for more options. Our platform delivers options and makes cloud computing easier for everyone, especially those who need a cohesive solution, with varying levels of storage, redundancy and management.

The industry is slowly recognizing the basic truth behind workloads for cloud computing, which is – workloads are not equal. Businesses are extremely diverse, even within the same industry. We are focused on empowering our customers through our innovation. We invite you all to look for additional features to MiraCloud rolling out in 2012 geared toward making our multihypervisor approach to cloud computing even easier for our customers, and, ultimately, their users.

As an organization Contegix is not only passionate about technology; we are also passionate about giving to those who need help, and we do this, by contributing to nonprofit organizations. A few months ago, a new employee started posting information about a special little girl on our internal communication network and we knew we had to get involved.

Ivy Tregenza and her family know a great deal about the gift of life, and they give thanks for it every day.  Six year old Ivy, “The Tiny Dancer”, was born with Primary Immune Deficiency, a specific antibody deficiency, Neutrophil Dysfunction, making her highly susceptible to infection and Pemphigus Foliaceus, an auto-immune skin disorder.

Ivy is a bright, cheerful and tough little girl who has been through more in her short 6 years than any of us will see in our lifetimes.  She has always wanted to be a ballerina, but was too sick and had no energy until September 2008, when she was approved for IVIG.  Ivy went from “constant, overwhelming infection, hospitalization and isolation, to preschool, family outings and no pneumonias.”

She also started ballet class.

Her health continues to be problematic, though much improved, and Ivy’s family struggles every day with making decisions regarding surgery and drugs needed to save her life, but come with serious side effects.

Recently, the Starlight Children’s Foundation granted Ivy’s wish to dance with the Australian Ballet at the Sydney Opera House. Without people who donate blood and give Ivy the chance to live a small part of the life every child deserves to have, this wish would not have been possible. Her day with the Australian Ballet was everything Ivy imagined it to be, and after being lifted high into the air by one of the male cast of Swan lake, she said: “You made me feel like I was flying”.

Ivy would be unable to fight disease without the help of Intravenous Immunoglobulin (IVIG), which is found in human plasma.  She and thousands of other children and adults alike, rely on all of us to do our part and donate the blood that helps keep them healthy.

An hour of your time is all it takes; one hour of your time can mean a lifetime of good health for someone else.  Will you give the gift of life this holiday season?

Contact your local chapter of the Red Cross to find a donation center, to organize a blood drive or to make a donation.

Please give and give often. Also, feel free to check up on Ivy from time to time by visiting her mom’s heartfelt blog – My Three Ring Circus – hosting sponsored by Contegix.

The holidays are a hectic time for everyone, in our personal lives, as well as in our business lives. At Contegix, we are especially tuned into the needs of our e-Commerce clients, who, at this time of year, are hopefully experiencing increased spikes in website traffic due to online shoppers. Andrew, one of our Engineering Team Leads says, “There are several components to capacity management for e-Commerce sites, but the most important aspect is the partnership between ourselves and the customer. Without great communication and the ‘team’ approach, it would be much more difficult to manage.”

Indeed. The process of onboarding for our customers often includes evaluations conducted on the client side, but also on ours. We like to plan ahead for web traffic spikes as much as we can, which often results in temporarily adding to a client’s infrastructure to handle seasonal spikes. Andrew explains, “Many times we will spin up cloud instances to manage these spikes, adding additional nodes to the same load balancer to facilitate seamless communications between dedicated physical servers and virtual servers. It’s an exciting part of my job because creating these types of infrastructures means we are providing true hybrid hosting for our clients who need it.”

Knowing what your business needs are, is certainly helpful in the communication process with us, because it helps our technical engineers design appropriate infrastructures rather than selling you capacity that isn’t necessary. “We are most successful with a combination of measurement provided by our e-Commerce clients that include traffic data from previous years and predicted levels for the current year. On our end, we plan for ultimate flexibility, leveraging our cloud assets within MiraCloud^TM, we can spin up and scale back capacity based upon system performance,” said Andrew. “Our managed clients have the security of knowing that their sites are constantly monitored 24/7/365, which allows us to get out ahead of any bandwidth or throughput issues that could arise due to seasonal traffic spikes.”

Every Monday morning as we gather for our weekly team meeting, you can find Tim, our Data Protection Team Lead, delivering a well thought out lecture to anyone within ear shot about every major sporting event that took place over the weekend. Throughout the month of October, this was especially the case as the Cardinals were fighting to win the World Series. Informative, passionate and highly entertaining, Tim always shares particular details about how the game wasn’t played exactly to his liking or which coach messed up what strategy – regardless of who won. The critical thinking skills and brain power behind the impassioned advice is what draws people to Tim and one of his biggest strengths – not simply for sports related discussion, but also in his work here at Contegix.

In the same way he evaluates coaches, players and managers on the baseball field, Tim is constantly evaluating the way in which our data protection systems are managed, despite constantly delivering positive results. “If a play works out because the other team missed the catch, that doesn’t make it the right play,” explains Tim. “Data must be backed up frequently and correctly, because when it comes to DLP, there is no such thing as a ‘happy accident.’”

Tim’s entrance into the Data Loss Prevention field was no accident either. When Tim was just ten years old he wrote a simple program in basic on an Atari 400 that simulated controlling the power flow into his friends’ homes. “The Atari power program I wrote was a fun way to fool my friends and they all bought it,” said Tim. “The significance of the program was that the Atari 400 had no hard drive to save files and the program had to be saved on a standard tape cassette, then loaded into memory off that tape…years later, a major part of my job is to save entire servers to tape. I guess you could say I started training for this position when I was ten.”

As a ten-year-old, Tim could easily demonstrate the necessity of backups to his friends and family based on the limitations of the technology he was utilizing. Now, he says it is a bit tricky to explain to people why offsite tape and other backup services are necessary. In his straight forward, honest and passionate tone, Tim states:  “Technology keeps moving forward and those selling it continue to make promises without regard for it’s true capabilities. The fact of the matter is, if no one is backing up the information stored on the system and an error occurs, there is no assurance that the data will be there when the system is restored or repaired.”

When asked if the software we utilize for backup management is the best choice, Tim responds without hesitation. “CommVault Simpana 9 has so much to offer. First of all, the management is completely centralized, the restores are super fast and reliable, plus the system’s diversity is beyond cool. It can literally backup just about any platform or application.” With an endorsement like that, coming from a guy who has no trouble criticizing, even when his team is victorious, we are confident we made the right choice with CommVault.

Through our Managed Service Hosting accounts, Contegix offers premium-managed services that help keep our customers’ minds off managing their technology and focused on their businesses. These optional Managed Services are available to all of our clients that give us the duty of managing their Internet Infrastructure needs.

Delegating such a big responsibility might seem risky—after all, information systems need constant monitoring and care. However our engineering and technical support staff members are known for their industry leading customer service and technical expertise. We are here to support our customers all day and all night, every single day of the year. Our support team is such an integrated part of our clients’ IT process and management, that often, clients experience our team as a natural extension of their own (be sure to let us know if you have openings on your company softball team). We cover it all, from protecting data and back-ups, to firewalls, and 24/7/365 system management, including monitoring. And you can relax knowing you are taken care of—we utilize the best equipment, we’re continuously evaluating our systems to deliver the best possible redundancy and we only recruit and hire the most experienced personnel (softball playing abilities are not guaranteed).

When you utilize Contegix Managed Services, you can sleep easy knowing our team of specialists will take care of everything. They manage installations and configuration, and your backup process. If a backup encounters problems, such as locked files or inaccessible data, a specialist is there to address the problem immediately.

Data protection is always a high priority for our clients. However, equipment failures, human error and end-user mistakes do happen. We know that the loss of data can be incredibly difficult for a business. To prepare for the unexpected, we offer customers backups to highly secure onsite SAN back-up system and an optional Offsite Tape Storage offering.

Our team of specialists ensures that customer data is backed up and protected. In the unlikely event that your systems require restoration, our support team delivers on our promise to be an extension of your team—available 24/7/365 to perform the restoration in the timeliest manner possible.

Contegix Managed Services give our customers peace of mind knowing their sites are up, applications are monitored and optimized and that their data is secure. Our team is here, when you need us, every day of the year to put those fires out for you. Learn more about our Managed Service Offerings.

If a football team took the field without having a backup QB on the bench, you might wonder about their chances… and their choices.

Now apply that to data.  Too many times, companies choose not to back up data, or when they do, back it up poorly. But no one wants to lose data, whether it’s important documents, customer or compliance information.

This is why Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is so important. In a recent CIO LinkedIn Marketpulse survey, 42% of CIOs said that they believe their current data management practices are outdated. Those feelings aren’t unwarranted. Right now, the world’s information is doubling every two years, with a colossal 1.8 zettabytes to be created and replicated in 2011. As Mashable says, that amount of data would require 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads to store. With the huge influx of data created by enterprises alone, this level of activity has broken traditional back up processes.

At Contegix, we take Data Loss Prevention seriously. We offer a number of ways to help our clients protect their data. We have an onsite Storage Area Network (SAN) that helps ensure that data is readily available and quickly accessible for fast backups and, more importantly, fast restorations and recovery. Both our SAN and optional Offsite Tape Storage back-up system are powered by our team of Backup & Data Recovery Specialists along with CommVault, the industry leader in data protection software.

CommVault creates and stores copies of data that can be immediately accessed for rapid recovery. It also utilizes multiple recovery points for added protection and provides hot backup capabilities for modern databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft Exchange among others.

We don’t stop there. If your business requires offsite archival, Contegix has you covered. Stored by a trusted third party in a secure location, your tapes are categorized and labeled. This effort will increase your business’s restoration capabilities in the case of a disaster.

And we go one step further with our DLP by offering Multi-Site Data Replication across facilities.

Data Loss Prevention is just that – Prevention. When our customers recognize the need for data loss prevention services, such as backups, at Contegix, we are empowered to manage this huge responsibility for our clients. Ultimately, this is our way of empowering our clients by removing the burden of technology systems backup from their shoulders.

At Contegix, one of our most important core values is “respect for people, data and time.” We are focused on adding value to our customers’ organizations by becoming part of the team. Our data loss prevention plans are designed with this purpose. Think of us as that insightful coach, looking at what’s needed on all parts of football field and thinking one, two even five plays ahead and our DLP team is that forceful offensive line capable of preventing quarterbacks from getting sacked.

Couchbase and Contegix would like to invite you to our upcoming Meetup in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 6:00-8:30pm. There is no charge to attend, AND pizza, drinks, and a t-shirt souvenir will be provided!

Matt Ingenthron of Couchbase will be there to discuss “Everything Couchbase: Server, Mobile and Modeling Apps.”

You can sign up for free here: http://couchbase-st-louis-meetup.eventbrite.com

The meetup is at HALE Communications located on 1099 Milwaukee St. in Kirkwood.

About Matt Ingenthron:

Matt heads up the Developer Solutions group for Couchbase and has years of background in developing the backend systems for many large-scale, consumer facing web applications. For Couchbase, Matt leads the team developing client libraries, samples and docs for developers.  In recent years, he has been a core developer on Membase and Couchbase, a contributor to the memcached project. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences including JavaOne 2011, MySQL 2011, MySQL 2010, OSCON 2010, Erlang Factory, Cloud Camp San Francisco, Silicon Valley Code Camp, and many others.

About Couchbase:

Couchbase is one of the leading NoSQL database software projects, with code, binaries and community residing at www.couchbase.org.  Couchbase, powered by Apache CouchDB, Membase and memcached Open Source projects, runs on everything from large-scale clusters in cloud compute environments down to iOS and Android mobile devices.  Its primary development is backed by Couchbase, Inc.