ClearPointe and EView Pair Up for Remote Management of IBM i Servers
August 9, 2011 Alex Woodie
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Organizations that are hesitant to completely outsource their critical business servers are increasingly turning to remote management services that give them some of the financial benefits of outsourcing without all of the risk. Now, as the result of a partnership between IBM i- and z/OS-monitoring specialist EView Technology and the Texas-based remote hosting provider Clearpointe, companies have another option when it comes to remote management of their IBM i environment. EView is a Raleigh, North Carolina, company that develops software that allows IBM i and z/OS servers to be administered with enterprise operations management consoles from Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard. The company has a bigger history fitting AS/400 and S/390 servers into its customers’ HP OpenView environments. But it has recently extended its core log- and message-harvesting tool, called EView/400i, to work with the Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) environment. Dallas-based ClearPointe recently joined Microsoft’s System Center Alliance. This should serve the company well, as a portion of its business involves managing customers’ IT investments through its hosted SCOM offering. Its multi-tenant implementation of Operations Manager 2007 R2 enables it to manage customers’ environments, whether they reside with the customer or in the cloud. Installed on the clients’ IBM i server, the EView/400i will provide ClearPointe’s SCOM with all the data required to monitor, correlate, control, and report on the performance and health of the IBM i server. The software monitors the QSYSOPR message queue and audit journal, among other logs. Two-way communication will enable ClearPointe demonstrators to take immediate corrective action if something goes awry on the IBM i server. The addition of IBM i monitoring capability through EView/400i will give ClearPointe a leg up in potential deals that require some care and feeding of the IBM midrange server, according to Bob Longo, ClearPointe executive vice president. “The interoperability between the IBM iSeries (AS/400) environment and Systems Center Operations Manager extends ClearPointe’s ability to offer customers a complete management solution which will help lower costs, automate and simplify operations, reduce risk, and obtain immediate costs savings and return on the investment (ROI),” Longo says in a press release. ClearPointe has grown through acquisition in recent years, and today manages more than 25,000 devices through its SAS70 Type 2-compliant network operations center, based in Little Rock, Arkansas. The company provides a full range of IT services, from server monitoring and management to network and firewall administration, vendor agreements, and upgrades. It primarily serves mid-size organizations in the professional services, healthcare, financial services, and education industries with between 200 and 1,000 employees.
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