Instrumental is a small privately held professional services business founded in 1991 that focuses on services in storage architecture, design and integration projects primarily in the high performance technical computing environment. Our primary customer base is the U.S. Government defense and intelligence community. These organizations utilize Instrumental’s capabilities to support technology integration, systems architecture and design, systems engineering and technical advisor roles. Instrumental has a staff with many years of experience in enterprise systems management, architecture, and analysis including experience with some of the largest and most complex systems ever built. 

Our Staff

Henry Newman – CEO/CTO

Mr. Henry Newman has over 28 years of advanced systems architecture and performance analysis expertise in solving the most complex challenges for customers in government, scientific research, and industry around the world.  This comprehensive experience includes hardware and software requirements analysis and design; file system and HSM design and optimization; system performance analysis and optimization; storage system architecting; high-performance networking; capacity planning; and hierarchical storage management with the focus on high performance computing and complex UNIX, Linux and Windows environments. 

Technical Staff

Instrumental employs highly talented individuals.  The technical staff includes individuals who are widely known and respected in managing and completing complex technology development, research and consulting projects. Instrumental employs a variety of high-end expertise from Project Managers, System Administrators, System Engineers, Performance Modelers, and Data Architects.

The following are samples (not all inclusive) of relevant programs being executed or completed by Instrumental personnel.  They are a combination of management, technical and operational support efforts that showcase our ability to manage and execute complex tasks for critical mission requirements.  More detail can be provided upon request. 

Systems Engineering

Instrumental provided the lead systems engineering effort on behalf of Sun Microsystems for the ground station integration effort in Seal Beach, CA. Instrumental provided COTS integration on clusters of systems with a 10,000 port attached enterprise switches.  Instrumental lead the performance optimization of this real time data capture environment throughout the entire data path including tuning system I/O architecture, file system tuning, RAID configuration, optimizing application system calls, and third party application testing. 

Instrumental is also providing technical leadership in the development of an enterprise architecture to support  numerous Open Source gathering activities and distribution of the products.  This engagement involves the consolidation of numerous, disparate, Windows and UNIX-based systems providing world-wide digital audio and video information to analysts.  Instrumental analyzed helped gather and then analyzed the requirements and developed a systems architecture to ensure that the performance of the data ingest, storage, archiving, and distribution to the end user is increased while the systems are consolidated into a single storage system based on the data type to allow simplified management and future architectural planning. 

Modeling and Simulation

Instrumental constructed an analytic model of an enterprise I/O subsystem for the purpose of comparing performance of a variety of flash based devices and conventional disk drives and their respective capacities.  The performance metrics included both input/output operations (IOPs) and throughput for a variety of enterprise workloads. The canonical model consisted of RAID subsystems populated by different storage grade memory and conventional disk devices.  The model included capabilities for three classes of RAID as well as estimated capabilities for the disk devices. 

Systems and Data Architectures

Instrumental has played an integral role in the DoD HPCMP Storage Initiative.  This includes on-site evaluations at the six major Program centers of current computing, networking and storage resources, storage-related vendor evaluations under NDA with visit to more than 20 vendors, and working with cross-Program teams to establish new a storage architecture intended to remain in place for the ten years.  Central to the new architecture is integration among the traditional storage components and an information life-cycle management (ILM) system to support both user level and system level management of data reporting, retention and flow through the Program’s facilities.

Instrumental will oversee its implementation and work with the Program to augment or replace the necessary hardware to meet functionality and performance goals.  Periodically Instrumental will review operations and performance, and make recommendations for modifications or upgrades to software and/or hardware as necessary.

In addition, Instrumental oversaw the architecture and application readiness for their disaster recovery capability that services hundreds of customer applications.  Instrumental led the systems administration effort to define and deploy the enterprise framework and network “bubble” for the server and storage of critical applications and failover to the DR site.  Instrumental is also leading the engineering team responsible for consolidation and security of account access and single sign-on. 

Our Committment

Each endeavor we pursue is backed by our corporate commitment.  We are fully committed and devote our corporate assets to create the strongest team possible to support this requirement.  Instrumental analyzes the requirements of each effort to ensure we can offer an unsurpassed technical approach, a highly qualified management team, and the best value for the contract.  The senior management of Instrumental commit to you, the customer, that our personnel will provide what is necessary to fulfill your needs throughout the life of the contract.  Instrumental offers quality services and products with minimal performance risk during contract start up and throughout the period of performance.