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Call Home, implemented via Electronic Service Agent, is designed to increase system availability by providing round-the-clock monitoring of your Power Systems by IBM. Once enabled, Call Home provides the following benefits,
- Rapid access to system inventory
- Performance Management for Power servers
- Automatic reporting of errors to IBM including immediate upload of error logs and initiation of IBM support requests
- Faster diagnostics and time to repair
- Access to customized maintenance information
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Collectively these translate to improved availability of your Power Systems.
Call Home is implemented using your IBM ID during activation. It enables you to view and and utilize system information on the IBM Support Portal at support.ibm.com. Electronic Service Agent is a secure tool, embedded in the HMC, that automatically reports problems to IBM Support if Call Home is enabled. It also transmits system information to IBM upon activation and as the environment changes.
Why enable Call Home features?
With the highly-redundant systems present in many of today's top business organizations, problems may go unnoticed until multiple issues arise. A combination of issues in a redundant environment can result in either data loss or system downtime. IBM Call Home is a crucial component to help minimize such events. This function has been proven to assist IBM Support Engineers to provide solutions up to 45% faster than systems without Call Home.
Since IBM Call Home constantly monitors the health and functionality of your system, should an event requiring service occur, the Call Home function first notifies both you and IBM Support of the event. The function then automatically opens a service request and transfers preliminary critical diagnostic data to authorized support personnel. By obtaining information in this way, IBM Support can quickly identify problems and develop an action plan for problem resolution giving you a more effective first contact support session and ultimately, an overall reduction in time to resolution.
Call Home also enables proactive tools,
- My Notifications: customized, proactive recommendations
- Performance Management: manage system capacity
- My Systems: to compare firmware levels across your data center
How secure is the transmission?
All information transmitted to IBM is encrypted and sent via secure protocols. At IBM the data is located on secured storage and accessibly only to customer authorized personnel. Additionally customers have the ability to view the data via the Event Manager function before it is sent to IBM.
What information is transmitted?
Only critical diagnostic information is sent via Call Home; none of the customer's business data is ever transmitted.
Where to find additional information about Call Home?