The definition and significance of business continuity have dramatically changed during the last few years thanks to factors such as a nonstop demand for goods and services, Mother Nature, and complex government regulations. Although most would agree there is little correlation between the three, a direct link can be associated for companies without a reliable high availability (HA) solution. Without protected data or IT systems, companies have the same probability of experiencing interrupted business, which in turn quickly leads to lost business, stiff financial penalties and, ultimately, disgruntled customers.
As much as IT leaders claim high availability concerns top their priority lists, an alarming number of businesses cross their fingers and hope for the best when the worst occurs. Unfortunately, reasons such as cost and limited staff predominantly surface when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.
Any company serious about implementing an HA solution should know that significant innovations have made HA both more affordable and easier to use. Although IT environment intricacies and administration requirements change from one implementation to the next, these innovations have made it possible for any business to protect its data and systems.
The latest HA innovations have built upon the inherent qualities of the System i to provide extensive self-managing, self-auditing, and self-healing functionality. The result is that today's best HA solutions require only minutes a day to manage, yet provide complete assurance that businesses are able to switch to backup systems when they want and when they need to.
Time and change are the enemies for any technology. Inevitably, IT environments change. Businesses expand and grow. Files change, applications are upgraded, and libraries are added or deleted. These are a few reasons why today's System i HA solutions continue to evolve and manage changes proactively and automatically with minimal time involvement. So what is the key message? Continual improvements in HA technology make it possible to obtain and maintain reliable IT infrastructure protection. Here are a few things companies should keep in mind before implementing a high availability solution.
Let the Technology Work for You
IT is challenging enough. Luckily, innovations in HA have enabled solutions that are highly intuitive and automated, leading to quick, easy, successful implementations. In the past, planning and designing an HA solution was a manual, consultant-driven process. However, because today's HA innovations automate and simplify the process of planning and deploying an HA solution, they have now become a perfect fit for any environment.
Look for a solution that collects important server and IT information, as well as the high-level business and availability goals for your business or project. The next step is automated IT analysis and discovery. Recent enhancements in HA solutions enable them to automatically interrogate the IT environment to intelligently identify the bandwidth, IT resources, critical applications, and data required for a successful HA solution deployment. A good HA solution can even establish an estimate of the communication bandwidth and server processing needs that will be required.
Making the implementation process even easier, another innovation now available in certain HA solutions processes all the information acquired during the phases described above and then creates a recommended configuration. The technology does the work by intelligently drawing upon the expertise and proven best practices established by hundreds of consultants over thousands of implementations. This ensures that the most effective and optimized HA solution configuration is created for your unique environment. The solution will then automatically complete the installation and configuration that was created during the previous steps. The HA environment is now optimized and ready to go.
Efficiency Keeps It Affordable
The way an HA software solution transports and applies data and object changes to the backup server is critical because it affects the overall efficiency of the environment and the way the HA solutions uses server resources. This can either raise or lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), a critical issue for companies of all sizes.
For example, direct apply technology means there is only one job on the target server that manages both reading from the journal and writing to the database. This process, while adequate in some circumstances, can significantly lengthen switch time and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of the solution. Far more effective and efficient is a solution that uses multi-threaded apply technology. This process separates the write and read processes to better manage server memory intelligently and minimizes the recovery time objective (RTO) by keeping the apply process current—even during the highest volumes or during catch-up after a switch. By bundling user data and application objects, it maximizes the efficiencies of processing resources, minimizes hardware costs, and manages availability at the application level. This conserves CPU and DASD so users spend less money.
In addition, an HA solution should optimize the apply process even further by paging into memory the database file pages most likely to be updated. This means the HA solution can "look ahead" and seemingly remember how something should be applied to save resources.
Automation Keeps it Easy
Undeniably, autonomic innovations have made using and managing HA environments significantly easier. However, "autonomics" has become a confusing term in the IT industry. In HA, autonomics offers significant time savings and productivity gains. Autonomics means automated, smart detection and correction of issues across the System i source and target environment.
HA autonomics should be designed to deliver increased responsiveness by adapting dynamically to changing environments. Autonomics should provide greater business resiliency by discovering, diagnosing, and preventing disruptions. The effect of a high availability solution's autonomics capability should be to continuously keep watch over daily operations so you can spend your time taking care of other important issues. Look for an HA solution that will proactively monitor communication lines, server processes, and replication processes as well as the applications that are running.
In addition, autonomics should reduce the time IT staff members spend finding the right rule and command to fix problems. Leading-edge solutions use smart recovery autonomics, which select the most efficient and effective way to fix errors, based on the type of problem identified. The solution applies those methods automatically.
Automation within a high availability solution has made it easier to perform switches and integrate HA into operations, such as data backups via tape. The job of automation is to enable complete simplicity, something companies of all sizes desire, especially when it is time to switch to the backup server.
Before automated HA solutions emerged, IT staff members spent significant amounts of time making sure all the underlying synchronization had been accomplished correctly, that underlying issues were resolved, that communications paths were clear, and that production and backup servers were "in synch." Only then could the switch process begin.
Innovations in HA take care of all the steps needed to accomplish a switch. This means switching will always remain easy. Users should only have to check the switch-ready status on screen and push a button. By itself, the solution should be able to do the following:
• Validate switch-readiness by ensuring there are no replication errors
• Inform you exactly what it will do and what the next step is
• Get confirmation for the switch and inform you
Switch time, however, is not the only time you can benefit from automation. Continuous data protection (CDP) innovations in System i HA add unique data recovery flexibility. System i HA and CDP provide protection against accidental or malicious data corruption and offer flexible options for businesses to quickly and easily recover data from any point in time. Prior to CDP innovations, options for recovering data that was accidentally deleted or corrupted ran the spectrum from manually re-entering the work to utilizing advanced database technologies, such as journaling or logging, and generally required a tape restore. These manual recovery processes took hours to complete and involved many error-prone tasks that could increase downtime.
Innovations Keep Improving
In the world of HA, continual enhancements are eliminating many manual processes and positioning the complexity of the technology behind the scenes. Innovations are making it possible for businesses to monitor replication, journaling, auditing, error resolution, and other status information all from one screen. All essential HA information can be viewed from a single place. Users simply set up a display screen in the operations center, and it automatically refreshes with the latest switch-ready status and any potential issues. This is simple and easy all in one!
Upgrades and enhancements to an HA solution are an important component of maintaining the long-term life of software. Typically, these can be disruptive and time-consuming, but today's leading HA solutions can handle upgrades and enhancement installations automatically. Often, this process involves using new remote access technologies. Answering a simple prompt should be the only task required to stay up-to-date.
Thanks to the new HA innovations, if companies choose wisely and well, they will have an affordable, easy to implement, automated solution that protects data and applications and keeps them accessible for users.
Michael Ross is the Director of Product Management at Lakeview Technology Inc., a leading provider of high availability, data protection, and data management software solutions. Michael has more than 10 years of industry experience and expertise in iSeries, Windows, Linux, UNIX, and networking. Michael holds many IT industry credentials, is recognized by IBM as a Technical Solutions Expert, and is a Certified Business Continuity Professional.
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