SoCal Water District Taps Bytware for Server Monitoring
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
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The extreme drought that has engulfed California is forcing everybody to conserve. For citizens, that means using less water and (the horror!) installing artificial turf. Faced with lower revenues, local water districts have also tightened their belts. Coachella Valley Water District provides water to people through 2,000 miles of piping covering a 1,000-square-mile area near Palm Springs, one of the driest places on earth. Conservation of precious resources like water is a way of life there. At the CVWD, conservation of IT resources is also a way of life. The organization is able to maintain a slim IT staff, in part thanks to the renowned stability and dependability of the venerable IBM i server, which runs billing, payroll, and other critical business processes for the 96-year-old district. Recently, CVWD took its resource conservation to new heights when it brought in Bytware‘s MessengerPlus to monitor the IBM i server for critical issues. Instead of requiring an operator or administrator to manually monitor the various queues and logs for signs of a potential problem, the software does it for them. Before bringing in MessengerPlus, responding to issues with the IBM i server could have taken some bit of time, says Gary Palomino, a computer programmer analyst with the district. “We had to find a quiet place with internet access, VPN into the network, wait for the System i to respond, then sign on,” he says in a case study on the Bytware website. Since bringing in MessengerPlus, things have gotten much better for Palomino and the 400 district users who need access to the IBM i server. “It gives us peace of mind,” Palomino says. “Our IT director, and everyone else that doesn’t understand the System i, don’t even have to worry about it if they cannot find us. They know we can answer it really quickly.”
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