A technical review of software and hardware-based solutions.

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper High Availability for IBM i available free from the MC White Paper Center. 

This article describes what you need to know in order to make an informed decision with regard to IBM i high availability strategies so that your business requirements for recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are not compromised. With the advent of the unified Power Systems platform, common storage platforms, and virtualization, maintaining high availability protection for an IBM i environment requires careful thought and clear understanding of its underlying architecture and technologies.

What are the requirements for a successful high availability and disaster recovery strategy?

Written by Maxava

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper "Critical Elements for Successful Business Continuity" available free from the MC White Paper Center. 

High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) are part of a combined strategy for reducing or eliminating the impact of planned downtime and unplanned outages, and for ensuring application availability and business continuity.

Regardless of size, most organizations are reaping the rewards, and addressing the challenges, of server virtualization.

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article introduces the white paper "The Future—and Present—is Virtual" available for free from the MC White Paper Center.

Virtualization has received considerable coverage in the IT trade press over the past few years, but is virtual real for the majority of IT shops? The answer is clear: yes, it is. According to IDC, despite 2009 being a very tough year for the IT industry and the economy in general, the virtual machine software market grew by 1.4 percent to $1.8 billion that year. And a growing body of evidence shows that virtualization is being adopted by a large percentage of companies in all industries and in all but the smallest of organizations—and even in some of them as well.

An approach to meeting the demands of a 24/7 availability environment and reducing the risk of downtime events.

Written by CCSS Ltd.

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper "How to Achieve High Availability with System Management in Five Simple Steps" available free from the MC White Paper Center. 

A hard-working System i environment is never more visible (or expensive) to an organization than when it becomes unavailable. The expectation is for optimal performance on a 24/7 basis, and beyond that, any system issues should be the remit of the IT manager—not seen, not heard, and most definitely not felt by the user community. Sadly, the realities of system availability can fall short of these exacting standards—whether the systems are truly available or not. This is because the definition of high availability means dif­ferent things to different groups within an organization.

There are a number of high availability solutions for IBM i-based systems, but they can be broken down into two broad classes: hardware-level and logical. Each has unique qualities.

Written by Dr. Frank Soltis

Reliability has been a hallmark of the AS/400 since its inception. Careful design and integrated hardware and software gave it a reputation as a system that almost never crashed. Nonetheless, reliability does not equal availability. Databases must be backed up and reorganized. Operating systems must be upgraded. And disasters can happen. Any of these incidents can create system unavailability.

As businesses adopt virtualization and cloud infrastructures to improve performance, they're shifting from tape to more efficient, flexible backup technologies including physical, virtual, and cloud.

Written by Information Availability Institute and Sponsored by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article introduces the white paper "Research Study: New 3rd Annual Report! The State of Resilience on IBM Power Systems" available for free download from the MC White Paper Center. 

Resilience has been described as the ability of a business to maintain a continuous flow of operations under virtually any condition. Yet, it's no news that unplanned interruptions in business attributable to human error and technological failure are widespread: Downtime and disruptions in primary business processes are estimated to cost companies millions of dollars a year in lost revenue.

Learn the simple way to correct tables with rows in a check-pending status.

Written by Paul Tuohy

Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from the MC Press book The Programmer's Guide to iSeries Navigator.

iSeries Navigator provides an easy-to-use interface for managing constraints, as shown in Figure 6.1. The details for constraints show the following:

There are many ways to back up your system and your data. What's important is that you actually choose one and use it.

Written by Debbie Saugen

The most valuable component of any computer system isn't the hardware or software that runs the computer but, rather, the data that resides on the system. If a system failure or disaster occurs, you can replace the computer hardware and software that runs your business. Your company's data, however, is irreplaceable. For this reason, it's critical to have a good backup and recovery strategy. Companies go out of business when their data can't be recovered.