What alternatives are there to legacy backups, and are higher standards expected today for the recovery of lost data?

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper Achieving Rapid Data Recovery for IBM AIX Environments: An Executive Overview of EchoStream for AIX available for free download from the MC White Paper Center.

Planning for recovery is a requirement in businesses of all sizes. In implementing an operational plan that ensures that both data and applications can be recovered, IT personnel are generally confronted with several challenges:

• How can I ensure my applications and data are recoverable without impacting business operations?
• Do I have data protection approaches available to me that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives?
• Can I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both my local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
• Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?

Mother Nature is unpredictable. You need to ask yourself: Are you prepared?

Written by Simon O'Sullivan

Natural disasters pose enormous threats to an organization's business operations, and 2011 will go on record as one of the most disaster-filled years in recent history. The year started with severe blizzard conditions over most of the U.S., which was soon followed by:

The lightweight, breakthrough cloud solution is designed to be highly fault-tolerant but takes you several steps beyond simple virtualization.

Written by Chris Smith

The momentum behind cloud computing continues to grow even though many organizations today are concerned about challenges involving security, reliability, standards, and control. Their solution instead is to take advantage of improved virtualization within existing hardware platforms, but a move into the public cloud is perceived tantamount to giving away keys to the castle. There is an in-between step, however, called the private cloud. Companies now can download a breakthrough entry-level cloud platform from the IBM Web site, set it up in a few hours, and use it free for 30 days.

Download this in-depth report of IT protection and recovery technologies/strategies for IBM i (i5/OS) and AIX environments.

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper "An Overview of Disaster Recovery and Availability Technologies for IBM Power Systems" available for free download from the MC White Paper Center.

Due to globalization, Web-based sales and service, more-vigorous competition, and more-stringent regulations, the goal of ensuring the availability and recoverability of data and applications has risen considerably on the priority lists of today's CIOs. A wide range of technologies is available to address this goal. At the apex of a spectrum of solutions sits a strategy that maintains highly redundant, geographically dispersed systems and data, commonly identified as high availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR). Occupying the lower extreme is traditional tape-based backup, which provides reliable but rudimentary disaster recovery capabilities. But between the two sits a variety of technologies offering various levels of system availability and recovery speed and completeness.

Database maintenance tasks are necessary but don't have to be tedious or excessively time-consuming if you have the right tools.

Written by John Ghrist

The storied strength of the IBM i in the area of database operations has been a strong selling point for the platform for years. Accordingly, paying attention to software tools that can help with database maintenance projects can be important to keeping that aspect of your business in optimum shape.

Menu documentation doesn't have to be boring anymore.

Written by Mike Faust

If you use User Interface Manager (UIM) menus to create your System i menus, you're probably already aware of the ability to use help panels to define your menu help. What you may not be aware of is that you can actually create much more dynamic menu documentation. In this tip, we'll explore how you can display an HTML document or PDF file instead of the old "green-screen" help text when your users press the Help key.

If you're getting too many annoying phone calls inquiring about system performance, consider installing MPG's Performance Navigator with its new EXPO feature.

Written by Chris Smith

How many system administrators have faced the dreaded phenomenon where the disk is growing out of control and nearing capacity? Besides panicking, what do you do? First, you might ask, why is the disk growing—and why right now? And you can't help but wonder—how long has this been building up? If you have the right performance management tools, a surge in disk growth doesn't have to be a scary event.

The freeware from Vision Solutions measures 10 system performance and database indices, including available DASD.

Written by Chris Smith

If the thought ever crossed your mind that you are spending far too much time optimizing your System i, then you're not alone. More than three quarters of those who currently do system optimization manually would prefer to have an automated optimization solution do it for them. About a third of system administrators who tune an IBM i today use native operating system commands, and an equal number run customized scripts to get the job done.