Overview of Services

Your monthly services and deliverables will be provided and billed as set forth in your subscription. Your current subscription is viewable through our customer portal at billing.katointegrations.com/portal/katospaces/. Additional services will only be performed as documented in writing through a support ticket/email, via the customer portal, or with a signed Kato Integrations quote.

Payment & Service Commencement

We require payment in full of the first term’s fees before beginning any service or subscription. If a change is made to a subscription to increase system resources in the middle of the term, prorated charges are billed at the time of the requested modification. These charges are based on the cost of the additional resources for the remainder of the current term.

Uptime & Availability

Our network and hardware services are provided by our data center partner. Accordingly, our service availability guarantees are inherited from their policies and service schedules. Our partner offers the following minimum guarantees:

  • Networking services - defined as our routers, switches, cabling, and internet connectivity - will be available 100% of the time in a given calendar month
  • Cloud computing solutions will be available 99.99% of the time in a given calendar month

Support & System Administration

Support is provided as requested via email at team@katointegrations.com. Our regular support hours are 8am-5pm US Central time, Monday through Friday, barring observed holidays. Emergency support is provided outside of those hours on a best-effort basis.

Administrative System Access

Our support team and data center engineers require administrative access to systems to perform maintenance, security, and support services. This takes the form of two *SECOFR-level accounts, used by our engineers to perform their support and maintenance tasks, and an automated monitoring account that cannot be used to login to the system.

Software Updates

Software updates may be performed by our support team on request. These activities are treated as system administration services and may be included in regular service charges or billed separately depending on the scope of work performed.

System-Level Access

As part of your IBM i hosting subscription, you have QSECOFR access to your system and the ability to create unlimited user accounts of any permission level/user class. As a best practice, we strongly recommend that the QSECOFR account is not used for regular system access, and that additional user accounts are created with more restricted authority for regular use.

Remote System Access

User accounts of sufficient authority may connect to the system remotely. This remote access is secured by limiting connections to authorized IP addresses via a firewall allowlist or by requiring the use of a secure SSL VPN client.

Kato Spaces officially supports IBM i connections made via software actively supported by IBM, including IBM’s Access Client Solutions, Rational Developer for i, and the Visual Studio Code for i extension. If you experience issues when using other third-party programs or emulators our ability to provide support is limited. In such cases, we can only confirm the following:

  • The Kato Spaces system is online and available to accept connections (TELNET/FTP/etc.)
  • Your location is authorized to connect to the IBM i, either via the public IP through the firewall or while connected using the SSL VPN client

Data Access & Retrieval

You own any and all data which you store on our servers, and you are responsible for all data stored on our servers. You do not have any right of physical access to the hardware. While customers retain ownership of their data, system-level access to underlying infrastructure is managed by our data center partner to ensure service integrity and security.

Data Transfer

Data can be uploaded to and retrieved from the system in any method that you are familiar with and comfortable using, including:

  • Transferring files (including *SAVF files) via FTP/SFTP, either using the command line interface or a GUI like IBM i Access Client Solutions
  • Network drive (may require the configuration of an IPSec VPN tunnel to extend your local network to include the cloud IBM i)

There are no bandwidth or data transfer limits on your connection to your Kato Spaces system.

Physical Media

Upon request, Kato Spaces can arrange for your data to either be uploaded to or retrieved from your cloud IBM i using a magnetic tape drive. Additional charges will apply for labor performed to restore or save the system data and for preparing and shipping the physical media.

Data Backups

Kato Spaces offers an optional backup package that can be added to your subscription. This backup package is a 14-day rolling schedule, configured and managed with IBM’s Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS), and includes VTL (virtual tape library) storage where your backed up data is retained.

Upon delivery of your system (or addition of the VTL package to an existing subscription), the backup jobs will be configured in the BRMS job schedule. You should review and release the jobs that are needed to meet your backup requirements. If you need assistance managing these backup jobs, please let us know and we will engage our engineers.

Saved objects can be managed with the IBM BRMS menu, accessed with the command GO BRMS from the IBM i command line (requires a user profile with sufficiently elevated permissions). This menu can be used to print restoration reports, view joblogs and messages, and restore objects. For more information on using BRMS, please refer to the IBM documentation for your installed OS version.