Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From IT departments to the Board Room, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability. This white paper will provide a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
The Benefits of Continuous
Data Protection (CDP)
for IBM i5/OS and AIX
Environments
New flexible technologies enable
quick and easy recovery of data to
any point in time. W H I T E P A P E R
Introduction
Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From IT
departments to the Board Room, managers have seen the importance of business
uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability.
This white paper will provide a road map to the most effective strategies and
technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or
corrupted due to accident or malicious action.
Planning for recovery-designing and implementing a solution to reduce the amount of
recovery time needed after an interruption-is a pressing requirement for businesses
of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and ap-
plications can be recovered quickly, IT managers are generally confronted with several
challenges:
. How can I ensure my applications and data are continuously recoverable without
impacting business operations?
. Do I have data protection strategies available to me that meet my recovery point and
recovery time objectives?
. C an I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both local and remote
(disaster) recovery requirements?
. Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?
Bottom Line: Businesses face a variety of risks to their data such as accidentally de-
leted files, data corruption from viruses or hacker attacks, software/hardware failures,
power outages or any of a wide range of natural disasters. Business and IT managers
need a data protection and recovery strategy that keeps the organization's business
doing business. For System i and AIX IT departments, this is a high priority.
v i s i o n s o l u t i o n s . c o mW H I T E P A P E R
Tape Backups: First Line of Defense
If you're like most businesses, you're using some form of data protection today-probably tape-based backup. Periodically, someone shuts applications down to perform a backup to tape. Depending on the volume of data that is being copied, this may take several hours and requires manual intervention to set up the backup job, run it, confirm that it occurred, and then return the application to operation.
The backup copy may be kept locally in case data needs to be recovered in the near term, and eventually it may be moved to an offsite location for archival storage purposes. The reason to make and keep copies of your data is so that, in the event of some sort of event or catastrophe that deletes or destroys data, you have a clean copy safely tucked away to use for recovery purposes.
The two most important metrics for determining the optimal capabilities of any data protection strategy are the recov-ery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RTO defines how quickly you need to restore data and applications and have them fully functional again. The faster your RTO requirement, the closer you move to zero interruption in uptime and the highest level of data protection. Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO defines the point at which the business absolutely cannot afford to lose data. It points to a place in each data stream where information must be available to put the data back in operation. Again, the closer you come to zero data loss and real-time access, the more continuous protection of data will be required.
Tape-only backups are Tape is used for backup and archive because it is very inexpensive, but it is an old technology no longer a feasible data that has been available almost since the dawn of computing. There are several issues with tape-based backup: protection strategy in today's business environment. . T ape-based backup is a time-intensive process that is potentially disruptive to your applications; this issue is commonly referred to as the backup window problem. . B ecause of its impact on applications and resources, tape-based backups are usually not performed more than once a day, and often only once every several days, meaning that there are very few tape-based recovery points ... [download for more]
