Surprisingly, 50% of small to medium sized businesses that have invested in a data availability and recovery solution may still be vulnerable to downtime. Download this free white paper to learn what you can do to avoid the same risk. You'll also learn what your options are for reliable IBM iSeries data protection and recovery that make sense for your size business.
An Executive Guide to IBM iSeries Recovery Options
W H I T E P A P E R
Overview
Today, companies rely on their IT systems more than ever. As business
processing grows to accommodate worldwide users and web traffic, applications
need to be available and reliable. Surprisingly, most companies, particularly the
SMBs (small and midsized businesses), have significant risk in both their
systems availability and recovery capabilities.
With all of the sophisticated technologies available on the market today, the
question is why are companies running this risk?
Why Gamble?
Is there a comfort that the IBM iSeries platform NEVER goes down or
perhaps is it the "we have never had a failure - it won't happen to us"
mentality? Just like life insurance, we hope we are never required to re-
build our systems. That said, most would agree that life insurance is a
responsibility we have to our families. Data protection and recoverability
should be viewed the same way - a responsibility we have for protecting
our businesses.
Other reasons SMBs might run this risk are the perceived costs of data
availability and recovery solutions or the belief that the technologies they
have in place are effective solutions for protecting their mission-critical
data.
The responsibility of mitigating this risk has typically been placed in the
hands of the IT organization to make sure applications can be recovered
within a defined RTO (recovery time objective). However, with the
increase in government and industry regulations and its responsibility to its
shareholders, senior management has begun taking the lead and setting
the guidelines based on the business' goals and objectives. They are the
ones that need to determine how long their applications can be
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unavailable without significantly effecting their business operations.
Imagine not having your e-mail or primary business applications for a
couple hours or even a couple days in today's hectic workplace. Rest
assured that executives in most organizations never say "we can be down
for three or four days".
Your Options
There are many data availability and recovery options available on the market.
The question is how do you determine which one is the best fit for your
business?
Relying on Tape Backup & Off-site Storage
Dedicated tape backup and off-site media storage is probably the most
popular method used by organizations today for the protection and
recovery of their data and applications. Tape backup solutions have
become common practice for most organizations. However, tape backup
is not fool proof.
Under this approach, data and systems are backed up on magnetic tapes
and stored in a safe or at an off-site location. Tapes are vulnerable to
getting damaged, lost or stolen and this method is difficult to administer. If
you ever had to actually access information on a tape, the process is
extremely time consuming and inefficient and does not meet senior
management's business continuity goals. Companies settling for this
option need to ask themselves "is our RTO acceptable for our business?"
Stepping it up to High Availability
High availability (HA) solutions are another option on the market. HA
software vendors have worked closely with IBM and the channel to
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promote dedicated replication solutions. This is the best way to recover
applications and ensure 24/7 availability. For the SMB client, there have
been attractive "packages" coming from IBM. Dedicated high availability
servers called "capacity back up" (CBU), have enabled more companies to
afford high availability.
