Our Approach to Your Solution

Many custom engineered solutions carry out their basic mission adequately, and sometimes quite well, but most leave a lot to be desired when it comes to the details. At ZIO, we pay special attention to the details that let you take ownership of the systems we provide.

The last thing you need when running a mission/system critical application is a service outage. If your system is like many we have seen, following a system failure, you will find yourself running around, ordering the backup machine out of stores, waiting for it to arrive, hoping that it works (i.e. hoping the spare tire isn’t flat), unplugging the failed machine, hoping you’re plugging the cables into the right connectors, seeing if the configuration settings are correct…

We design applications and systems to run in hot backup mode, where multiple instances and machines, often in multiple locations, are available to take over the required tasks in event of system failures. Using heartbeat agents and other diagnostic functions, our systems avoid the “spare is flat” syndrome by reporting the health of the backup systems, and watch for failure in the current production systems, to initiate seamless cutover in case of trouble. We eliminate the need to unplug and plug hardware by networking all field devices and other systems to which we communicate. Any live data repositories are kept current and concurrent on each instance within the system, so any backup can take over the load at any point in the operation.

How many times have you set up software and found that it won’t work unless you log the onto the workstation as an administrator? How often have you found that server tasks only work when the server is logged on? How many times have you been asked to violate system security policies in order to get this system to run?

We write our applications with security and workability in mind. Unattended tasks are built to run as services or in background mode, server applications work without being logged on, and we take ease of use and appropriate operational conditions into consideration throughout design and testing.

User Configurable

Now we know you have seen this situation: You get everything working and run for a while, with good results. Then, you have to change your network setup, and it requires that you change some hostnames, or move your IP addresses to another subnet. So you go to reconfigure your applications and you find that in the custom engineered software you bought, all the hostnames are hard coded. Or, you find that your applications don’t even resolve to hostnames, and require static IP addresses (which are also coded into the software).

We never hang you out to dry like this. Our applications are made to be configured by users, technicians, service people, engineers, whoever is responsible for setting up and maintaining systems we supply. We provide registry settings, configuration files, or whatever other method is needed to store parameters. When specified, we also provide configuration front ends to lead the user through the process.