Enhanced Technical Support (ETS)
Enhanced Technical Support Highlights
Enhanced Technical Support (ETS) is a service solution that offers an integrated approach for proactive, coordinated support for multi-product and multi-vendor IT environments to maximise IT infrastructure availability at an effective cost.
ETS covers all IBM Systems, IBM Middleware, Storage and Networking heterogeneous environments and the most popular non-IBM products such as Windows, Linux and VMware.
ETS services are built around three value propositions:
- Proactive Approach to ensure high availability for vital IT services
- Rapid Response to critical threats and situations
- Integrated Support Service for complex, heterogeneous infrastructures
Benefits of ETS
- Proactive advice and guidance to pre-empt problems
- Rapid problem solution to improve availability across complex IT infrastructures
- Integrated support combined with IBM expertise helps companies anticipate and respond to new problems and challenges faster
- A coordinated support service to reduce cost by optimizing availability and preventing any unplanned disruptions
- Onsite software support for emergency situations
- A resilient infrastructure with minimised risk of disruption
- An effective way of managing TCO and unlocking resources.
ETS offers several new and enhanced support capabilities on top of the standard basic support offerings such as HW & SW Maintenance, SupportLine, and Passport Advantage including:
Account Advocate Team: A remote pool of technical specialist that, based on a good knowledge of the customer’s environment and organization, will drive all the ETS pro-active and critical situation tasks. Using state-of-the-art tools, the Account Advocate Team offers proactive advice and provides a coordinated support that will help to optimize availability and also prevent unplanned disruptions.
Regular review calls to provide advices and guidance on how to better maintain the hardware and software products.
According to the type of environment, this is a standard “Review call” agenda:
- Review HW & SW problem status
- Present technical alert info that concerns a clients IT environment.
- Review System performance result and discuss
critical areas, if any - Agree follow-on and/or preventative actions.
Fast response time: Contact within 30 minutes for critical problems on all the entitled HW & SW products.
On site support: In the event of a software critical problem that cannot be analyzed remotely in an effective way, the Account Advocate Team will involve an appropriate technical person to the client’s site.
Customized Preventive Maintenance: The Account Advocate Team will regularly provide analysis reports related to problems occurring on a worldwide basis, in the System i, System p5 and z/OS area, where they may impact a Clients environment, and the information on the program fixes which will potentially avoid these critical problems.
CustomPac: Delivery of a customized package of program components to facilitate program installation, program upgrade and the application of fixes on System z servers
Performance monitoring and advise for System i & System p5.
Microcode & firmware update recommendations for eligible machines.
GDPS Service: Problem determination, corrective information and program fixes for IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex solutions (Country option).
RCMF Service: Problem determination, corrective information and program fixes for IBM Remote Copy Management Facility solutions (Country option.)
Products
ETS is available on ServiceSuite and Enterprise Service contracts for the following platforms and support groups:
- System z (zSeries): (z/OS – OS/390 – z/VM – VM – VSE – Linux)
- System p5 (pSeries): (AIX – Linux)
- System i (iSeries): (OS/400 – Linux)
- Linux for PC
- Linux Clusters
- Microsoft Windows
- VMWare
- Storage (Disks/Tapes – SAN/NAS)
- Networking (NEW) (IBM, CISCO, Nortel, Avaya, Checkpoint, Symbol,CirPack.)
Prerequisites: IBM Maintenance and SupportLine on the entitled products.
Middleware SWG products are supported in the frame of the ETS support group of the eServer platform on which they run.Prerequisites: ETS for the Server platform & Passport Advantage.
Citrix products: When the ‘AIX’ or ‘Windows’ support groups are selected, the ETS services will be provided also for ‘Citrix for AIX’ or ‘Citrix for Windows’ products.
Prerequisite: Support Line for Citrix products.
SteelEye products: When the ‘Linux for PC’ support group is selected, the ETS services will be provided also on SteelEye products.