IBM Integrated Support Services for IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage
With your mission-critical business processes running on IBM® Power Systems™ and IBM Storage products, you need to feel confident that your support solution facilitates high availability and operational efficiency. While your in-house resources can perform basic hardware repair and system administration, in-depth problem analysis and tracking of multiple issues may not be the most cost-effective use of their time. You may also want a more complete solution with the ability to choose your optimal support model when purchasing the products. With IBM Integrated Support Services, you can simplify your support strategy and your procurement process by choosing your required level of support from one of our tiered service options;
Basic Care Services
Provide the base level of hardware and software support for all of your devices.
Essential Care Services
Provide enhanced response times and a dedicated team that knows your environment, helps keep your systems available and responds quickly to outages.
Premier Care Services
Expand the level of support provided by essential care by adding proactive support services that are designed to help prevent outages.
IBM Software Maintenance
IBM Software Maintenance (SWMA) for AIX and i5OS operating systems answers the need for a single contract that includes both software support and software updates.
Key Features
Support is provided during normal business hours. Severity 1 problems are included with full 24×7 coverage.
Key Benefits
Software Maintenance for AIX and i5/OS is designed to maximise the benefits of your investments by providing:
Access to software updates, new versions and releases, as they become available.
Major Event Support
When your business enters a critical period, outages are simply out of the question. The impact caused by the downtime can lead to significant financial losses and damage your reputation. Preparing for these challenging incidents and maintaining uptime is vital. Major Event Support provides targeted proactive and enhanced reactive support for your most important systems during critical periods. Typical events might be major sporting occasions, or any period during which you might expect a surge of sales, requests for service or visits to your website.
IBM Major Event Support is a blended hardware and software capability which offers enhanced support for a set period of time. It is customisable to each client’s needs, with a combination of proactive and reactive services. A dedicated manager provides a 24×7 single point of contact for your business, and at the end of the enhanced service period, you will receive a wrap-up report.
Support extensions
A lack of in-house expertise for end of service IBM software can lead to extended downtime that may disrupt your business operations. IBM service extensions can provide extended support for 2 or 3 years after the official end of service dates. This service allows you to run your software with continued access to IBM technical support while you plan upgrades or next steps. It is available 24 hours a day, every day. IBM offer the flexibility to customise services for your environment to support your unique requirements. By providing easier and more direct access to IBM’s highly skilled technical specialists, the IBM solution allows you to raise ‘how-to’ and short-duration usage questions as well as providing fixes for new defects.
Service Extension Benefits:
- Allows unlimited calls to be placed
- Enhances your IT availability and performance
- Support the productivity of your IT staff with easy access to skilled specialists
- Offers reassurance and peace of mind
- Enables faster problem determination and resolution
Enhanced Technical Support (ETS)
Enhanced Technical Support bridges the gap between hardware and software support, providing you with a dedicated account advocate who works with you to help maximise your IT systems availability. Proactive monitoring of your system allows your account advocate to pre-empt and resolve potential problems before they arise, saving you from system downtime and any associated costs and revenue loss.
ETS Benefits:
- Dedicated Remote Account Advocate
- 30-minute response of severity 1
- Planned outage notification
- Critical situation monitoring
- Problem management
- Monthly review calls
- Performance management
- Proactive preventative maintenance
- Health checks
- Customer days
Hard Drive/Media Retention (HDR)
In the event of a hard drive or flash memory failure, you need to protect one of your most important assets—customer data. Typically, replaced media components become the property of the manufacturer and may be refurbished and sold. Though unlikely, it is possible that confidential data could be exposed. As a result, your organisation may face penalties from noncompliance with privacy regulations. Many organisations want to keep defective media components that may contain sensitive data so that the data is under their control. IBM media retention is designed to facilitate better control over sensitive data by allowing you to retain hard drives and flash memory components for IBM products that are replaced as a service repair action. By planning for media retention before experiencing a failure, you can speed replacement while also simplifying asset tracking, depreciation and budget planning. With your hard drives or flash memory retained in-house, you can better manage regulatory compliance mandates and proactively resolve the issue of customer data retention.
IBM media retention solution helps you to maintain control over the entire chain-of-custody for regulatory compliance. By helping secure the privacy of highly sensitive information that may be stored on a hard drive or flash memory, your business can better manage government regulations, which can help you avoid the fees associated with noncompliance. In addition, you can more easily address privacy concerns in highly sensitive industries such as banking, insurance, medical and public sector.
Global Total Microcode Support (GTMS)
If you’re like most organisations, your business is highly dependent upon your IT infrastructure. Should obsolete microcode cause system failure, your operations can come to a halt—and security issues might arise. Chances are your in-house IT staff are already preoccupied, or they may lack the detailed knowledge needed to assess microcode intricacies. If your business has multiple locations, the logistics of maintaining microcode across your enterprise can be cumbersome.
IBM Global Total Microcode Support can identify and update microcode versions during planned preventive maintenance of your environment. This service, available with IBM maintenance contracts or during the warranty period, offers an integrated microcode maintenance approach across IBM® Power Systems™ and System Storage® platforms. Experienced service specialists perform the time-consuming analysis of your environment and can apply solutions before your business is impacted by problems. You can schedule updates with reduced disruption.
You can choose from two levels of support to help you optimise your IBM cross-platform operating environment. The analysis portion of the service examines all systems included in your contract, the interaction between those systems, and dependencies among hardware, microcode, device drivers and operating systems. The results of the analysis are documented in a support plan, which provides microcode update recommendations. Or, you may select the analysis and update option, in which IBM can implement the recommended updates outlined in the support plan at your direction. IBM can perform the analysis and update up to two times a year, depending on your needs, and install the updates at a time that is convenient for your business.
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