Verizon Business Offers Remote Solaris, Windows Server Management

Published: March 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have Solaris or Windows servers and you are sick of managing them, then Verizon Communications, the phone company and IT services wannabee, wants to talk to you.

This week, the Verizon Business unit of the telecom giant announced a new service called Remote Internet Protocol Application Management Service Basic, which is a complicated way of saying that Verizon, which knows a thing or two about managing large data centers, will use its IP network to reach out into your network and manage your Solaris or Windows boxes. Verizon says that it will manage the servers at your data center, in a third-party data center, or in one of the 100 data centers it operates in the United States for its own use and for those of its outsourcing customers (yes, Verizon has a relatively large hosting and outsourcing business).

With the Remote IP Management Service, Verizon loads management software on your machines and then gives you access to the same Web-based system monitoring and management software it uses internally, which is called Total View. The Verizon software watches all the key aspects of performance and capacity on the machines, and allows users to see problems as they crop up and work with Verizon Business techies to resolve whatever issues are affecting the servers. The service also includes patch management, asset management, and other basic server management tasks that IT departments have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. For an extra fee, customers can actually back their systems up onto Verizon storage or have Verizon perform network scans to test for security holes. This being the telephone company, pricing was not announced.