Until recently, System i high availability solutions were reserved mostly for large enterprises. Now that high availability is dramatically easier to use and less expensive to own and manage, the picture has changed. Thousands of small and mid-sized companies can now afford to cost-justify the "luxury" of rapid, complete data recovery. Interestingly (and fortunately), this shift is occurring when downtime is causing more of a disruption and expense to businesses than ever before. With technology costs dropping and downtime costs skyrocketing, companies have a huge incentive to evaluate System i high availability technology.
Five Reasons Why Smaller
Organizations Should
Consider High Availability
Dramatic changes in cost and
ease of use have made
downtime-reducing technologies
more accessible.
W H I T E P A P E R
Overview
® TUntil recently, IBM System i high availability solutions were reserved mostly for large enterprises. Now that high availability is dramatically easier to use and less expensive to own and manage, the landscape has changed. Thousands of small and mid-sized companies can now afford the "luxury" of real-time, offsite data protection, as well as rapid and complete data recovery.
Fortunately, this shift is occurring just as downtime is causing more of a disruption and expense to businesses than ever before. With technology costs dropping and downtime costs skyrocketing, companies of all sizes have a huge incentive to evaluate System i high availability technology.
This white paper will provide a review of the core causes and costs of both planned and unplanned downtime and will then provide a detailed discussion of current options for High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions. Most importantly, as you read you will learn why true HA and DR protection are now within reach of even the smallest of businesses.
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
RPO vs. RTO Before looking more closely at the cost factors of high availability (HA)-and why each has changed so significantly-it is helpful to first understand the concepts of recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery-point objectives (RPO).
The graph in Figure 1 shows a variety of common System i business continuity technologies in which one axis indicates the time it takes to recover data after a failure/disaster (RTO), and the other axis indicates the completeness of data that is ultimately recovered (RPO).
Figure 1 - RPO and RTO and the spectrum of System i DR Solutions/strategies.
Companies have a At the low end of the disaster recovery (DR) spectrum is tape backup (basic availability) and huge incentive to at the high end is high availability (HA)-a process more technically known as logical data replication-plus-switchover (LDR+Switch), which rapidly moves users and processes to a evaluate System i high fully mirrored secondary server in order for it to assume all or most of the functions of the availability technology. production server.
Unfortunately, the perception of many mid-size and small companies is that HA technology is so much more expensive than basic disaster recovery protection that it is considered "out of reach" in terms of both cost and complexity. But, in line with most other computing technologies, the range of options between the most basic DR protection and the high-end, fault tolerant, enterprise-scale solutions has increased and, overall, the cost of all the options has come down, radically in some cases.
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Factors of High Availability Costs
High availability is certainly not "cheap" when you consider all of the components that are needed. What has changed is how the cost of each of these factors-each for its own reasons-has dropped. Here are the major components that contribute to the cost of an HA solution:
Hardware-A second System i server is needed, with enough capacity to accommodate the storage of replicated data and potential production demands. For instance, depending on how fully you want to run your applications from your backup environment during planned and unplanned downtime, this server may need to handle the same scale of transaction volumes and devices supported by the production machine. If less than full capability is acceptable during downtime, adjustments can be made. But in the end, a second server, ready to run, is a must.
Computer-system Communication Bandwidth-If the second System i server is located off site, which is downtime costs American what is necessary to have true disaster recovery protection, then sufficient communication capacity (bandwidth) is needed to accommodate the amount of data flowing to it from the businesses one million production machine. This includes the I/O processing capacity of the backup server and the dollars per hour. communication lines between sites.
High Availability Software-This component executes, manages, and m... [download for more]
