HOURLY CONSULTING
Paid for problems
illustrative senior hourly rate
- Slow work bills more than fast work
- Recurring issues are recurring revenue
- Senior rates for routine patching
- Knowledge stays in their heads — you stay dependent
Managed IBM Power · AIX · VIOS
We're paid to make your systems boring.
Hourly consultants profit when your estate has problems. We charge a flat monthly fee — so every issue we prevent and every task we automate is margin for us and uptime for you. When your systems are quiet, we both win.
// read-only · open code · you keep the report
Illustrative simulation · 15 seconds
Environment assessment ready
Preparing environment view
The incentive problem
Every hour of drama is billable. Unless it isn't.
You need senior Power judgment about twelve days a year. You should not pay for it 365. We keep senior judgment on call — and automate everything else.
POWERTRUE
Paid for calm
$flat /system/mothe line doesn't move
- Every prevented issue is our margin, your uptime
- Deterministic automation does the routine
- Senior engineers step in when judgment matters
- Everything documented — leaving us is easy, which is why you won't
Why we do it this way
We learned to manage this the hard way — so you don't have to.
John and PJ started together at a major financial institution 25 years ago — back when a once-a-year touch counted as good systems governance.
The world didn't stay there, and neither did we. We took a completely unmanaged estate and had to learn, for the first time, how to actually run it: applying security, patching every month, updating the operating system, firmware and microcode, VIOS, and the HMC — and doing it all together, so the whole stack still worked at every step.
That's the part outsiders underestimate. Any one of those updates is straightforward. Keeping all of them compatible, through years of change, without ever taking the system down — that takes a level of detail and care you only earn by doing it, over and over, on systems that aren't allowed to fail.
We got our battle scars managing that much change the systematic, safe way. Now you get the discipline without the scars — your critical systems cared for by people who've already lived every version of this, and moved with it every time.
How we work
Two rules we don't break.
Always be able to get back to where you started. Every change is reversible before we make it. We keep a backup — and we've tested that it actually restores, not just that it ran. We copy a config file before we touch it. We stage upgrades on a separate drive. If something goes sideways, "undo" is already in place.
If you don't know what's going to happen, you can't hit enter. No guessing on systems that can't fail. We test everything, over and over, until it's routine — and we iterate on our playbooks until they handle the error conditions, not just the happy path. By the time we run something on your system, we've already run it many times on ours.
The process
Assess → Plan → Fix → Maintain.
No branded jargon to learn. Four plain steps — and your team keeps doing the work that moves the business while the boring comes off their plate.
AIXray
Our open, read-only engine scores one system across nearly 100 checks in 9 categories — red, amber, green, in plain English. You keep the report.
Every fix, in order
A complete, risk-sequenced path to bring the estate current — written down, yours to act on with anyone.
We execute the plan
Systems brought current, hardened, and documented — with a defined finish line the work visibly reaches.
Kept boring
Flat monthly fee. Monitoring, structured patching, verified backups — and a monthly report a manager reads in ten minutes.
What “boring” actually means
No magic. The fundamentals — actually done.
None of this is exotic. It is what every operations manual says to do. The difference is that under a flat fee, it gets done every month without fail — because skipping it costs us, not you.
ENVIRONMENT STATUS — ALL SYSTEMS ALL GREEN
CURRENT
Patched & current
OS levels, firmware, VIOS, and efixes stay current on a set schedule. Never 'when we get to it.'
WATCHING
Monitored, always
Automation watches errors, storage, hardware events, and drift continuously. A named engineer reviews every alert and acts on what needs attention.
RESTORABLE
Backups verified
'The backup ran' is not the standard. We rehearse restores. Recovery is proven, not assumed.
HEADROOM
Capacity planned
We measure growth and project it forward. So you buy storage, memory, and CPU on your budget cycle — not during an outage.
TUNED
Performance tuned
Real tuning against your real workload. Not the defaults left in place since install day.
WRITTEN
Documented, living
Runbooks and a per-system record that update as things change. Nothing depends on anyone's memory.
How the automation works
AI does the thinking. Automation does the doing. A named engineer makes every call.
This is how a flat fee stays profitable without cutting corners — and how AI never becomes a risk to your production systems.
01
ThinksAI reads at machine speed
Our AI reads advisories, CVEs, and logs at machine speed. It drafts a plan. It cannot touch your systems. Your data stays on models we run — never an outside AI service without your written consent.
02
DoesDeterministic runbooks act
Every change comes from a tested, version-controlled runbook. Same input, same result, every time. No AI improvising on production. Ever.
03
DecidesA human owns every change
A named senior engineer makes or approves each change. Every action is logged with a name on it. When judgment is needed, decades of it show up — that's what the flat fee keeps on call.
The front door
Don't take our word for it. Ask your own system.
AIXray is our assessment engine — open code, free for your own systems, read-only by design. Your most cautious admin can read every line before it runs. Then it tells you, in numbers, where the system actually stands.
- Run it yourself. Download it free from our public release — no email, no form — then score any of your systems in minutes.
- Or start by talking to us. Twenty minutes with Tanner to work out whether we are a fit; if we are, one of our engineers walks the findings with you from there.
- Want it fixed? The findings feed straight into the plan. That part is up to you.
$ ./aixray --assess --host acme-prod-aix01
PASSTechnology Level currency — 7300-04 (latest TL)
FAILOther filesystems — /opt 94%; repo (informational): /usr/sys/inst.images 100%
PASSMemory composition — computational 67%, file/numperm 12%, 1218MB avail (29%)
FAILOS backup (mksysb) evidence — /image.data older than 90 days
FAILSSH root login — permitrootlogin yes
WARNMonitoring agent — no KNOWN monitoring agent detected (checked: Zabbix agent, Nagios NRPE, Prometheus node_exporter, IBM Tivoli/ITM kuxagent, collectd, njmon/nimon, Datadog agent)
58 PASS22 WARN12 FAIL5 NOT ASSESSEDRED
POSTURE: RED — full report written to ./aixray-report.html
Massive transparency
Boring raises a fair question: 'why am I paying these guys?' Good. Ask it.
A service you never notice should have to prove itself every month. We built ours to survive the scrutiny.
A report you can actually read
What was patched, what was found, what is coming — written for a manager to read in ten minutes and hand to leadership. Every action logged to a named engineer, session recordings kept in your environment.
Written down, not memorized
Runbooks, indexed history, a living per-system record. The knowledge lives in artifacts, not in a person — yours or ours. Key-person risk dies in the documentation.
If we leave, you keep everything
Every record about your environment is yours — a successor could take over tomorrow with a complete picture. Our automation is our machinery; nothing you need is locked inside it. We compete on the work, not the switching costs.
Built for mid-size Power environments — too small for the big integrators' attention, too critical to neglectAssess your systems.
Assess your systems.
For free.
Start with twenty minutes with Tanner and we will work out whether we are a fit — or skip the conversation, download AIXray, and score your estate yourself. Free, read-only, no obligation, yours to keep either way.