Red Hat - Virtual Server Service

FY2022 & FY2023 Summary

Overview

This service allows for the use of the industry-leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system for agency application hosting on dedicated hardware in one or both of the State's data centers. Our goal is to provide a high performance, highly secure, and highly available Linux environment to support your agency's needs.

Included

• Assistance identifying requirements, quoting, purchase, installation, and maintenance of physical hardware to support requirements. Support for the hardware is included.
• Installation, administration, maintenance, and patching of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, including all security and functional configurations, as well as physical disk partitioning and mounting of external storage. Red Hat support is included.
• Alert-based monitoring is provided for system availability, error conditions, and disk capacity limits during normal business hours.
• System administration staff availability to work with the application vendor and/or MaineIT application support teams as necessary.
• Management of system log files.
• State/Federal audit support for topics relating to hardware and operating system controls.
• Multifactor authentication and privileged access management is standard on all servers.

Excluded

• Application and supporting software administration and maintenance is the responsibility of the agency's application support team unless otherwise arranged.

Service Level Targets and Availability

• Standard business hour coverage is 7:00AM – 5:00PM Monday through Friday, excluding holidays. On-call support staff are always available, please contact MaineIT Operations at 207-624-7700 to reach a team member after hours.
• If service is required for non-production systems outside of the standard business hours, prior arrangements must be made with the director of this service area (contact info below) and may incur an additional charge.
• The standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a managed server is 99.9% availability excluding scheduled outages. Please note, this can be increased by requesting additional instances in a high availability configuration, with a separate service rate charged for each server.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - this is the expected amount of time it may take to restore the system in the event of a system component failure, 24 hours. This can be reduced or eliminated with a high availability configuration.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - this is a measurement back in time to when your data was preserved in a usable format, usually to the most recent backup, 24 hours. This can be reduced or eliminated with a high availability configuration and/or by changing the default system backup schedule (default is nightly).

Service Rates: Please see the MaineIT Rate Table.

On the Bill

Options Available for Additional Charge

• Unduly expensive hardware configurations may incur charges above the published rate. If necessary, this will be negotiated before buying the hardware.
• Additional monitoring.
• High availability and clustered services.
• Complex and/or extensive Linux shell scripting support.

Customer Expectations

• Individual users follow all State of Maine IT policies and procedures, including all security policies.
• The Agency will provide contact information for an agency representative (typically MaineIT Application Development staff). This person or group will be the target for communications regarding the server hardware and operating system.
• Privileged access must be performed via multifactor authentication.
• Any issues or problems experienced with this service are reported to the MaineIT Linux team as they (the issues/problems) are encountered. Issues must be recorded in MaineIT’s ticketing system, currently Footprints.
• Cooperation with and participation in the regularly scheduled (currently monthly) server patching process. It is critical that application teams validate applications after patching of lower environments before patches are applied to production.
• Will proactively migrate to newer operating system versions as the vendor announces support end of life for the existing version.
• Agency application development staff will install and maintain required software (above the operating system) on behalf of the agency.

To get help, or to order this service

• Call MaineIT Service Center at 624-7700 and assign to the Linux team.
• For application projects (new projects or major enhancements or upgrades), contact the MaineIT Project Management Office (PMO).
• A Footprints ticket is required for all non-production work requests. All production work requests require an authorized RFC. A billing code is required for items that are not listed in the 'Included' section above. 
• If the published SLA is not met, the issues can be escalated to the next priority level by contacting the Enterprise Data Services Director, Linux Team Manager, or your friendly Account Manager:

• Rob Cote, Manager of the Linux team 
• Jeffrey Jordan, Director, Enterprise Data Services 
• For an after-hours production break fix contact MaineIT Operation at Customer Support at 207-624-7700 
• MaineIT Operations will engage the On-Call Core Technology Duty Manager if necessary.

Priority Levels for Monitoring

• The standard production published service level agreement can be viewed at the following link: Standard SLA Maine IT Production Services.
• Standard business hour coverage is 7:00AM – 5:00PM Monday through Friday, excluding holidays, please contact MaineIT Operations.
• If service is required for non-production systems outside of the standard business hours, prior arrangements will be required with the director of this service area and associated fees will apply.