SilverBack Technologies Inc., a leading full-service Management Service Provider (MSP), Wednesday (Feb 14) announced the availability of additional features and services to InfoCare, the company’s flagship subscription-based IT monitoring and security service.
New InfoCare enhancements augment the existing service offering by providing system- and application-level monitoring capabilities for networks running Oracle, Sun Solaris and UNIX-based applications. In addition, InfoCare now ensures the security of a subscriber’s business-critical information by providing enhanced access control list (ACL) options and secure socket layer (SSL) encryption capabilities.
“Companies continue to search for ways to optimize IT infrastructure investments without sacrificing the health of the business,” said Robert Klotz, CTO of SilverBack. “At SilverBack, we recognize that these companies demand better, more comprehensive ways to monitor the health of their IT environments.”
For Cleveland Motion Controls Inc., a multinational provider of motion control systems for manufacturing companies, InfoCare is providing a cost-effective way to monitor and secure its critical IT information. “InfoCare’s ability to provide Oracle reporting and frame relay monitoring as well as historical trending and topology mapping, via a unique distributed model consisting of a state of-the-art data center and an appliance that resides on our site, was key in our decision to implement the InfoCare service,” said Jeff Nelson, IT manager at Cleveland Motion Controls. “For example, with our enterprise resource management applications, we were able to determine conclusively that issues we had initially thought were bandwidth-management related were indeed client/server issues. With SilverBack’s InfoCare service, we now control our network instead of the network controlling us.”
SilverBack’s InfoCare network monitoring and security solution incorporates a number of leading technologies designed to optimize performance while maximizing value. InfoCare latest enhancements include:
- Oracle Database Monitoring – This service enhancement uses the Oracle SNMP agent to track various parameters in the areas of space, memory and I/O, including transaction rates, calls per transaction, block changes per transaction, table space usage, row source ratios, continued row ratios, buffer hit ratios, library cache hit ratios and redo log buffer contention. Initial support is for instances of Oracle 8.x and beyond. SilverBack has also added an Oracle InfoStack to the InfoCare dashboard to provide a graphical view of those metrics.
- Solaris/UNIX Monitoring – Similar to the NT monitoring capability currently provided as part of their base InfoCare service, SilverBack’s new Solaris service monitoring technology uses the UCD-SNMP agent (4.1.2) and support versions 2.6 and 2.7 of Solaris to monitor CPU, memory and disk utilization parameters. Additionally, SilverBack provides alerting for specific metrics/components, including CPU, memory, disk and power supply.
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Transmission Enhancements – In their continued commitment to security, SilverBack’s InfoCare now provides SSL support in all aspects of the service. Complementing their existing support for encrypted VPN tunnels between the SilverBack InfoCenter and the customer-side InfoNest, SSL support provides a secure link between the InfoNest and any client the customer uses to view InfoCare’s collected IT information.
A cost-effective, subscription-based service, InfoCare delivers a solution for SMEs to glean specific, on-demand information from their network, system and application infrastructures. InfoCare utilizes off-the-shelf, industry-leading software applications to provide fault, asset, performance and security, metrics information across customers’ entire IT environments.
This broad suite of pre-configured applications en
ables the SME customer and service providers alike to quickly generate actionable “on-demand” information pertaining to IT health. Information from each application is correlated, integrated and displayed to the customer through an intuitive Web-based interface called the SilverBack InfoPortal (SIP).
SilverBack is a privately held company headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, founded in spring 1999 by former executives of Nortel Networks Corporation and Micromuse Inc. SilverBack is an industry pioneer Management Service Provider (MSP) and has developed a turnkey service that delivers specific, timely and actionable information to front-line network managers, planners and executive management via a Web-based portal.
SilverBack is a founding and executive member of the MSP Association, an international industry consortium formed to define, shape and promote the emerging managed network services sector to aid in accelerating the adoption of MSPs.
