i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1 now provide many great backup and recovery enhancements to make your job easier.

By Debbie Saugen

There are many new and exciting backup and recovery enhancements with i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1. One of the key highlights for V5R4 is the capability of saving and restoring using Integrated Virtual Tape. i5/OS Virtual Tape support is unique to i5/OS. It makes use of the disk on the system and does not require a separate hardware device as with other Virtual Tape Library support. i5/OS Virtual Tape support offers a save and restore alternative to the current i5/OS save file support. Software encryption for backups using Backup Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) is a key highlight for IBM i 6.1. Moving backup media offsite for safekeeping incurs the risk of losing media during transport, making encryption of sensitive data an essential safeguard.

The need for HA is no laughing matter in the current economic climate. Check out your HA software options for the System i.

By John Ghrist

Keeping your System i servers processing 100 percent of the time was, for many years, not considered a serious requirement for any but the largest of companies. The intrinsic reliability of the System i and its predecessors was good enough for most SMBs, which relied on the platform to handle processing during normal business hours. Add to that the cumbersome implementation of early high availability (HA) systems for the platform in the late '90s and into the current decade, and you had a market situation such that, for the majority of System i shops, HA was either a luxury most enterprises had no room for in their IT budgets or the potential makings of a standup comedy routine at a company party.

In a tightening economy, it's more critical than ever to protect one of the most important assets a company has: its data.

By Peter Briggs

Editor's Note:  This article is based on SafeData's white paper titled "High Stakes of Data Availability: An Executive Guide to IBM iSeries Recovery Options," which is downloadable for free from the MC White Paper Center. 

Today, companies rely on their IT systems more than ever. As business processing grows to accommodate worldwide users and Web traffic, applications need to be available and reliable. Surprisingly, most companies, particularly smaller businesses, have significant risk in both their systems availability and their recovery capabilities. With all of the sophisticated technologies available on the market today, why are companies taking unnecessary risks?

Companies can be back running in less than an hour with no hardware investment.

By Chris Smith

VAULT400 has teamed up with Maximum Availability on a new managed-service high availability solution that stores data offsite and allows users to pay by the month.

What VAULT400 is calling Managed Service High Availability guarantees to restore full service to a customer in one hour or less of notification that its system has gone down. The customer will roll over to the VAULT400 server running the client's pre-installed applications and *noMAX replicated data, and continue operations via a virtual private network.

You've consolidated multiple servers onto one larger machine. Great! Now, what happens if that one server goes down or is taken offline for maintenance?

By Bill Hammond

An increasing number of companies have consolidated or are considering consolidating multiple servers onto one or a few centralized systems. Their reasons for doing so are varied. The following are among those most often cited: