Infrastructure — Compute
Server and virtualization management for New York businesses
Some workloads still belong on servers you can point to. Stedholm runs them properly — hypervisors administered, hardware lifecycled, patches on schedule — and gives you a straight answer on what belongs on-premises, in a colo, or in the cloud.
Cloud-first is a preference. Placement is a calculation.
Plenty of workloads genuinely belong in the cloud, and we move them there — that is the Azure managed services half of this conversation. But a flat, predictable workload running hot around the clock, a line-of-business application wired to office equipment, a CAD file server whose users sit thirty feet away — these can be cheaper, faster, and simpler on hardware you own. The right answer is a per-workload calculation, not an ideology in either direction.
What is not negotiable is how on-premises infrastructure gets run: hypervisors administered with change control, firmware and patches on a schedule, capacity reviewed before it runs out, hardware replaced on lifecycle dates that appear in a budget years ahead — and every virtual machine backed up to standards set by our business continuity practice, with restores that get tested.
This service is part of infrastructure services, standing on the network designed under network design and management.
What’s included
Hypervisor administration
Hyper-V and VMware environments managed with change control — host patching, VM lifecycle, snapshots used properly, and migrations between hypervisors when licensing economics change.
Hardware lifecycle
Warranty tracking, replace-by dates budgeted ahead, and end-of-support planning for operating systems before the deadline plans it for you.
Patching and updates
Operating system and firmware updates on a published cadence, staged and rolled back cleanly when a patch misbehaves.
Storage and capacity
Storage administration, growth reviewed on a cadence, and performance investigated with measurements rather than folklore.
Backup integration
Server workloads backed up immutably and restore-tested under our business continuity standards — an untested backup is a hope, not a control.
Datacenter and colocation
Placement analysis, colo selection and moves, and remote-hands coordination — for the day the server closet stops being a defensible place to keep the business.
On-premises, colo, or cloud — the honest version
An office closet is fine until it is not: one power feed, marginal cooling, a door that locks if someone remembers. Colocation buys real power, cooling, and physical security without rewriting the application stack — often the right middle step for firms not ready or not suited for a full cloud move. The cloud buys elasticity and geographic redundancy at a price that must be computed per workload, not assumed.
Recent hypervisor licensing changes have pushed many firms to re-run exactly this arithmetic. When a renewal multiplies, the options are to renegotiate, to migrate hypervisors, or to move the workload — and the right answer differs by workload. We run that comparison with real numbers, including the ones that favor doing nothing.
Wherever the workload lands, the operating discipline follows it — the same monitoring, change control, and documentation, whether the host is in your closet, a colo in New Jersey, or an Azure region.
Signals worth a rethink
Hardware out of warranty this budget cycle
A virtualization renewal that multiplied
A server closet with one power feed and no cooling plan
An operating system approaching end of support
A DR answer that starts with “we would probably…”
Common questions
Shouldn't we just move everything to the cloud?
Sometimes. We price each workload against its cloud equivalent — including year-three costs, not just migration-quarter costs — and give you the comparison. Some workloads move, via cloud migration; some demonstrably should not, and we will show you why.
Our VMware renewal came back several times higher. What are our options?
You are not alone; recent licensing changes did this across the industry. The realistic options are renegotiating, migrating to another hypervisor such as Hyper-V, or moving affected workloads to cloud infrastructure. Each has real costs and real risks — we lay them out per workload rather than defaulting to whichever one we would prefer to sell.
Can you manage servers in a colocation facility?
Yes. Monitoring, patching, and change control are location-independent, and we coordinate the facility’s remote hands when physical work is needed. We also run colo moves as scoped projects — the discipline is the same as any migration: inventory, staging, rollback.
What happens when hardware fails?
The honest answer is that hardware fails on its own schedule, so the design has to absorb it: redundancy where the business case supports it, spares strategy, monitored warnings before failures where the platform gives them, and tested backups as the floor under everything. What we will not do is quote you a recovery number we have not rehearsed — rehearsals live under business continuity.
Get a straight answer on your servers.
An engineer will inventory what you run, where it runs, and what it costs — and tell you what to keep, move, or retire.