Research and Reporting

Lone Eagle^TM Systems conducts research projects where both an in-depth engineering background and clearly-communicated results are of primary importance. Skilled at bridging the gap between marketing and engineering, Lone Eagle Systems has a long track record of undertaking research projects where the result educates its clients' marketing, sales, and systems engineering staff -- while raising the level of its clients' expertise in the eyes of its customers.

Nowhere has Lone Eagle Systems' work been more valuable than in the service provider area. Since 1996, Lone Eagle Systems has been researching and preparing up-to-date versions of Sun Microsystems' Internet Service Provider Configuration Guidelines whitepaper. Prepared through collaboration, research, and interviews with Sun staff and its ISP customers, this document has served to promote the use of quality products and approaches to designing ISP architectures.

Other of Lone Eagle Systems' research projects include researching and preparing a guide to architecting and managing Internet Data Centers (IDCs), storage-on-demand architectures for IDCs, a guide to building automated Web hosting environments, and a series of presentations with speaker notes that provide guidance to service providers in areas such as managing growth, configuring for high availability, how to leverage server products, and how to choose appropriate serviceability models.

Proof-of-Concept Prototyping

Beyond research and reporting, Lone Eagle Systems develops proof-of-concept prototypes where diverse technologies are combined to create innovative solutions to complex problems. This level of development work is called for when concepts need to be proven or more in-depth research results need to be obtained:

	Lone Eagle Systems helped to prototype a hierarchical storage management system that integrated storage products from multiple vendors -- serving as a proving ground for technology that can change the way that data storage stacks are configured and managed in the future.
	When one client wished to deploy a multi-vendor video solution, Lone Eagle Systems developed a multi-threaded, JavaTM technology-based, server-independent interface that demonstrated how the company's core software could control a heterogeneous network of digital video servers in a vendor-neutral fashion.
	One key project was adapting Sun's iPlanetTM Portal Server software -- originally designed for an enterprise deployment -- to prove its effectiveness in an Application Service Provider (ASP) environment. The result was a detailed cookbook that described to service providers both the benefits and the nuts-and-bolts details of providing portal services to business customers.

As a consultant to service providers, Lone Eagle Systems practices what it preaches by maintaining its own network of heterogeneous workstations, Web, mail, and portal servers. These are linked together and connected to the Internet using broadband and wireless networks, and uses techniques including perimeter security, demilitarized zones, and virtual private networks.