Consulting Overview

If you are new to Perforce, our Fast Start package helps you get started quickly. We visit your site to provide the following:

• Hands-on user training for users in a lecture/demo/lab format (2 days)
• Perforce "Server Deployment" package (1 day)
• Hands-on admin training for your Perforce administrators (2 days)
• Design of your Perforce implementation, including branching strategy (1 day)

The Fast Start package is often combined with custom services to support migration of your legacy SCM data from other systems. See "Custom Services" for more details.

* In enterprise environments, the Fast Start package may be extended to provide additional training for larger teams, configure additional servers, and provide additional services.

If you are bringing a new Perforce Server online, we can ensure that you get started on the right track by optimizing your Perforce installation and automating many of the administrative tasks.

Key Benefits

• Offline checkpointing: Back up and verify your server with near-zero downtime
• Easily manage several Perforce instances on a single machine
• Volume layout designed for performance and data integrity
• Receive notifications when critical tasks complete (or fail)
• Automated maintenance and optimization
• Advanced setup for replication and high availability and disaster recovery

Components

• Best Practices for Server Configuration
  • Depot initialization, including the spec depot
  • Implementing basic Perforce security
  • Typemap configuration
  • Change review notifications
  • Training for your Perforce administrator
• Standard Administrative Tasks
  • Automated mass user creation
  • Backups and upgrades
  • Integration with your standard backup solution
• Set of Automated Scripts
  • Server initialization scripts for all supported platforms
  • Offline checkpointing to provide high availability backup solution
  • Replication for disaster recovery

A consultant will analyze and address performance issues with your Perforce deployment by determining the root causes for issues and documenting recommendations for addressing them.

A thorough checkup of your Perforce infrastructure will be performed and if needed, we will:

• Analyze your Perforce configuration
• Review server hardware configuration
• Analyze Perforce server log and identify specific user requests that may cause performance issues
• Review workspace configurations, branching practices, file metrics, and the protections table
• Review automated processes interacting with Perforce, including continuous build systems and defect trackers
• Run server performance benchmark tests to compare your hardware performance to known performance baselines established by Perforce

We analyze your current Perforce deployment for procedures and policies for supporting user requirements and make recommendations in line with best practices.

Additionally, if needed, the consultant will:

• Review access controls and the protections table
• Audit build and release practices and processes
• Survey build and release scripts, or any other systems interacting with Perforce
• Assess general system administration best practices, including management of users across multiple Perforce instances
• Examine your branching strategy
• Plan for your IT department to provide Perforce as a managed hosted solution, balancing the benefits of centralized IT with the performance needs of distributed development teams.

We provide the assessment, project management, and technical expertise to execute migrations big and small from a variety of other SCM systems.

If you need to replace an SCM system for a single team, or establish Perforce as your corporate standard SCM system across multiple business units, we help to ensure your migration goes smoothly when migrating to Perforce from:

• IBM Rational ClearCase
• Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
• CVS/Subversion
• Serena PVCS
• Borland StarTeam
• and more

Whether your SCM system is used by itself, or is an integral part of a complex legacy software production line that includes build, release, and workflow management systems, our consultants can help.

We work with you to evaluate your high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) options and help you design the best solution for your environment.

An effective HA/DR solution built on the Server Deployment Package will save you valuable time and money if a hardware failure strikes. One customer in the online travel industry calculated that the HA/DR solution we designed for them saved an estimated $900,000 in prevented down time.

Perforce consultants are well versed in the full range of HA/DR options, including:

• Server replication
• Using a SAN as part of a semi- or fully-automated failover solution
• Integrating clustering technology
• Custom solutions based on metadata replication, journal replays, and archive file transfers
• To learn more, read the Perforce High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solutions white paper for six solutions, along with their recommended configurations, that we have identified to work well.