In the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey, high availability and ibm disaster recovery (DR) was ranked as a top priority by respondents. DR solutions provide a failover site to ensure that your business keeps functioning even after a data center outage.
The solution replicates your Production environment data to the DR site, with either asynchronous or synchronous replication. The replication occurs through a private network that links your HMCs, hosts and Virtual I/O Servers at the sites.
Backup and Restore
Backups are a critical part of the disaster recovery process. If you don’t have an adequate backup and restore system in place, it’s only a matter of time before your business comes to a screeching halt.
Backup copies are created on a regular basis and stored at a separate location to reduce recovery times in the event of a data loss. Backups are created in three types: file restore, differential backup, and image restore. File restore is the quickest way to recover individual files. Differential backups copy only the data that has changed since the last full backup and image restore requires a complete system backup that can fully reconstitute the device.
As a small business owner, you wear many hats and have limited resources, but you can’t afford to ignore the importance of backup and recovery. A robust disaster recovery solution can help you mitigate risk and support sustainable growth. It should be easy to use, run automatically, and be configurable to your specific needs.
High Availability
Keeping your IT systems running smoothly with minimal downtime is critical to business continuity. High availability (HA) uses redundant IT infrastructure to avoid single points of failure, enabling the system to recover from hardware or software malfunctions without losing data.
HA includes hardware redundancy and redundant network devices. It also relies on clustering, with servers configured to share workloads. The clusters can then take over from a failed server with minimal performance impact.
This is especially important for industries that depend on continuous functionality, like finance and banking. If an online banking or point-of-sale (POS) system fails during peak volume, the institution could lose revenue and face dissatisfied customers.
IBM Sterling HA includes a dormant DR instance that is automatically activated during a declared disaster, and it uses a private IBM SoftLayer network to replicate data between the Production and Pre-Production environments. The network enables near-synchronous replication that reduces recovery times and minimizes lost data.
DRaaS
DRaaS provides an alternative to building and maintaining your own disaster recovery hardware in your on-premises data center. The DRaaS vendor maintains a failover environment in the cloud and you pay for use of those resources under an agreed upon SLA.
Your Production environment web and application data is replicated throughout the day to a Disaster Recovery instance, and backups of your database and key site and environment data are completed daily. Depending on the DRaaS provider, asynchronous replication or a more robust high availability Disaster Recovery option may be offered to meet your business needs and requirements.
If a failure is detected and declared to be a disaster, IBM switches your Production environment into a temporary Disaster Recovery Production environment and creates a new Pre-Production instance. When the disaster recovery process is complete, your Production environment is switched back to your on-premises data center and you notify all relevant parties that your Disaster Recovery environment was activated.
Integration
As businesses rely more and more on highly complex, internet-dependent IT and telecommunications systems, maintaining availability is becoming increasingly challenging. With a high availability and disaster recovery solution, you can ensure that your business processes continue to run without interruption during man-made or natural disasters.
With a Disaster Recovery solution, you can replicate your entire IT infrastructure to another data center in real-time. You can then use a dashboard to view the health of your IT infrastructure and business processes.
A wholesale distributor in Asia Pacific used IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery to reduce recovery time from 48 hours to 24 hours or less. This helped them meet customer service objectives and improve their IT operations.
