IT Infrastructure

What we design, install and manage

Infrastructure is the part of IT nobody notices until it fails. Your line-of-business applications, your phones, your security tooling and your backups all sit on top of it. Therefore a weak foundation shows up as slow file access, dropped calls, failed backups, and Wi-Fi that works in one room and not the next. Most of the "application problems" we are called about turn out to be infrastructure problems. A switch running out of ports. A server past its warranty. Cabling installed for a smaller office three moves ago.

Wired and wireless networking

We design networks around how your space is actually used, not how the floor plan looks. That means a site survey first, then access point placement, channel planning and power. As a RUCKUS Elite Partner we deploy RUCKUS access points and ICX switches, managed centrally through RUCKUS One. If you are running Cisco today, the transition is less disruptive than most teams expect — the RUCKUS CLI mirrors Cisco IOS, and the two interoperate over standard protocols, so you can migrate switch by switch.

Servers, storage and virtualisation

We size server and storage platforms to your real workloads. As one of Nutanix's longest-active partners, we have migrated hundreds of workloads onto hyperconverged infrastructure, which unifies compute, storage, virtualisation and data protection into a single platform. However, hyperconverged is not the right answer for everyone. We will tell you when a conventional build is the better value.

Structured cabling and the physical layer

Cabling outlives every device plugged into it. Consequently it is worth doing properly: correct category, tested and certified terminations, labelled patching, and a rack the next engineer can work in. Power protection, cooling, firmware currency and documentation matter too. None of these are exciting. All of them decide whether year three is quiet or expensive.

On-premises, hybrid, or cloud

There is no single correct answer, and the honest one depends on your workloads, your data residency obligations, and your appetite for capital versus operating cost. Some workloads belong in the cloud, and we handle that through our cloud migration practice. Others are cheaper, faster or simply safer on hardware you control. Many businesses land somewhere in between, and hybrid is a legitimate destination rather than a stalled migration. We start from what you are trying to achieve, then choose the platform. Not the other way around.

How an infrastructure project runs

First, we assess. We document what you have, including the parts nobody has looked at in years, and we identify what is genuinely at risk. Next, we design, and you get a proposed architecture, a bill of materials, and a clear explanation of the trade-offs we made and why. Then we install, with cutovers staged and scheduled around your business, because a big-bang cutover concentrates all the risk into one evening. Finally, we manage it, because infrastructure drifts without attention. Ongoing monitoring, patching and lifecycle planning are part of our managed IT solutions, so the platform we built keeps performing as your business grows.

Why businesses choose OPUS

We are vendor-aligned, not vendor-captive. Our partnerships with RUCKUS, Nutanix and Microsoft mean direct escalation paths and better pricing, but we are not obliged to sell you any of them. Our support desk is open 6:00 am to 11:00 pm Pacific, seven days a week. We attend on-site across Metro Vancouver, and we support clients across Canada, coast to coast. And because infrastructure and security are inseparable, the network we design is built to be defensible — segmented sensibly, monitored, and integrated with your cyber security controls from day one.

A recent engagement

Anonymised, as all our case studies are. A shipping company running 40-plus servers had a Cisco HyperFlex platform that had aged out, and they were facing rising costs to keep a VMware hypervisor environment going. We demonstrated and then sized a Nutanix hyperconverged platform to replace it. Their own feedback since has been about how much faster the system is. The full account, including the managed services transition it came out of, is on our managed services page.