25 Years of IT Experience from SME to Blue-chip
Located in the quiet village of Greenfield, Saddleworth, in the Pennine Hills between Manchester and Leeds, Allonby IT Limited endeavours to deliver outstanding IT consultancy to its customers. From beginnings with Pick R83, Windows for Workgroups 3.1, Windows NT 3.51 and SQL 6.5 through to the latest in Windows Server and SQL 2017 via VMWare ESX 2.1 - 6.5, Exchange 5.5 - Azure, it has been a wonderful journey.
I believe we are all blessed with gifts, unfortunately many people do not find out what gifts they have. I have been very lucky to have found my gifts and have used them to achieve what I have done. Any successes go to the one who gave me the gifts, any failures are mine.
I have met many great folks along the way and have learnt many things, in this website I hope to be able to share some of them with you. I hope you will find something that interests, entertains or possibly even enlightens you. I would love it if you found something here that helped you solve a specific problem or at least steered you in the right direction.
Contact
➤ LOCATION
Greenfield, Saddleworth, Oldham, Manchester
☎ CONTACT
dave.allonby@allonbyit.com
+44 7967 455663
Areas of Practice
SQL Server General DBA
As time goes on, Microsoft bless us with new features, bells and whistles. As the product grows the requirements for maintenance grow and change. A team can find itself on the back foot if the basics are missed. Once this happens it is very difficult to dig out of that pit without additional resource. Allonby IT can help your team to stop fire fighting and get back to proactively delivering service to your users.
Finding new team members can be a huge problem for non DBA managers, Allonby IT can conduct technical interviews in order to find you the right person.
“Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.” Thomas W. Higginson
PowerShell scripting
If you do some thing once , use the GUI, if you do it more than once , script it. Lets face it, the GUI is great for certain tasks but it has one huge drawback, the user. If i had a pound for every typo i have made writing this website , I’d no longer need it as I could retire;-).
Scripting processes and changes provides us with a way to ensure consistency, reduce human error, preserve configuration history and speed time to delivery. We are only limited by what we can imagine so let your imagination have full run of this field of creativity.
I aim to provide Powershell resources here for your free use. Every creator wants to share his creation and if my creation can help you then I will be thrilled to receive feedback.
SQL Server Migration and Consolidation
The motivations for moving or migrating SQL can be many and so can the issues and challenges. Allonby IT has extensive experience of database migration and upgrade in situations of divestment, acquisition , version upgrade, data centre relocation and consolidation.
I aim to provide resources on this site that you can freely download and use to help you with some of the more difficult pieces of your migration. If you thought the database engine was a challenge or SSIS a minefield then you will love SSRS.
Clustering and High availability
A long, long time ago in a lab in the basement of MAM Software in Deepcar Sheffield I set up my first ever failover cluster. The operating system was NT3.51 and then 4.0 the servers were Digital Prioris ZX 5000, they were linked to an external array controller by SCSI2 cables and the software was Digital NT clusters 1.2a as I remember. It was a thing of wonder.
This predated clustering in NT4.0 and in fact Digital sold the NT Clusters product to Microsoft which became ‘Wolfpack’ and Microsoft Cluster Services in 1997.
Since then I have clustered at many levels, at the hypervisor, local area failover clustering, async remote DR solutions, log shipping, transactional replication, mirroring even storage replica and combinations of the above. Each have there merits and there pitfalls. I can help you with this.
SQL Server performance and tuning
Changes to infrastructure , OS, SQL version, usage and other factors can affect performance. You may not have invested in performance tuning opting for hardware upgrades to meet your overall performance goals, but now find you are at the limit of your tin and your budget. Allonby IT can help you formulate a roadmap to guide you through phases of optimisation from quick wins to longer term redesign and recommissioning equipment so that it better meets your goals.
As a Yorkshire lad I enjoy efficiency of brute force and it is very rare that wins can not be found in any system whether through configuration, maintenance, indexing or coding. Let me help you get more performance for less cost…
Everything else…
I would never have had such a wonderfully diverse career if I stayed in my comfort zone. There are times where everyone’s face is blank, no-one knows how to do a thing. It is those occasions where one knows no less and no more than any one else where one can truly enjoy the thrill of the chase and the joy of the solution.
If you need help with a curved ball, something not just out of the box but beyond the furthest reaches of the warehouse, down the street and past the post office, then let me know. I can either help you or console you…