04.10.11 - As of August 1, 2011, ppi Media, a manroland subsidiary, will permanently monitor the production systems at the data center of the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (RNZ), a newspaper company in Heidelberg. The object is to establish an early warning system that relieves the publisher's IT staff from routine technical tasks and creates more time for new projects.
In addition to its own production systems, ppi Media will, in future, also maintain external systems and the Linux operating system at RNZ. “By continuously monitoring the most important applications on the server and checking the OS resources such as the CPU, RAM and file systems with regard to utilization and availability, potential faults can be detected and fixed at an early stage. We hope to achieve maximum availability of the systems from the Application Services from our software supplier, ppi Media,” says Daniel Schulze, CEO of the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung.

Manuel Scheyda, Senior Vice President of Support Operations at ppi Media, is certain that this target will be achieved. “To secure permanent system availability, we have taken extensive preventive measures that cover a large number of routines. These include checking how full the file systems and databases are and checking the processes that are running in the CTM.” If any faults are detected, an automatic message is sent by email or text message to the IT standby team at RNZ. On request, IT staff at the publishing house will receive personal notification from ppi Media's support center.

The Application Services
ppi Media has been offering extensive Application Services since 2010. Apart from the services ordered by RNZ, the Application Services also include, for example, cloning guidelines, i.e. customized guidelines for duplicating production and test systems. To ensure production security if the primary server should fail, ppi Media offers its customers customized tools for replicating the data systems and databases. Mittelbayerisches Druckzentrum Regensburg, Rheinische Post and Druckhaus Waiblingen are all Application Services customers of ppi Media.