Connectria Unveils IBM i Remote Monitoring Service

April 19, 2011 Alex Woodie

Connectria, a provider of managed hosting services for IBM i servers, last week announced a new remote monitoring service for IBM i. Starting at $795 per month, customers can hire Connectria’s tech support staff to keep an eye on their in-house IBM i servers.

Connectria has more than a decade of experience running IBM i servers for some of the best-known brands, including Louis Vuitton, Things Remembered, Ecko Unlimited, and Gulfstream. The St. Louis, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 customers, and operates data centers in its St. Louis headquarters and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The company’s new System i Remote Monitoring service builds off the established outsourcing business. As part of the service, Connectria will provide 24/7 remote monitoring of the IBM i servers that customers keep at their locations. In the event of a problem, Connectria will notify the customer.

The new monitoring service complements in-house expertise, and provides an insurance policy of sorts, according to Rich Waidmann, president and CEO of Connectria. “We believe our System i Remote Monitoring Services are low risk, low cost services that yield big rewards for our customers,” Waidmann says in a press release.

“Many companies rely on their IBM System i servers as a critical computing platform that runs their business,” he continues. “Most have limited staff or resources for supporting their System i environments. Rather than have a company’s system administrator or manager respond to alerts and issues in the middle of the night, Connectria’s 24/7 staff can remotely monitor or manage their System i servers to ensure problems get resolved before our customers come back to work the next day.”

Connectria formed a partnership with CCSS, a provider of IBM i systems management software, in December 2009. The partnership involved CCSS’ systems monitoring and management tools, which Connectria uses for its outsourcing customers. It’s unclear if this new remote management service also uses the CCSS products, but it would seem likely, as this type of bureau-based, remote management capability is becoming particularly popular in today’s cloud-connected world.