New, powerful lower-cost software is putting HA within reach of SMBs as are innovative virtualized and hosted HA cloud solutions.

Written by Chris Smith

Natural disasters and increasing requirements for 24/7 operations have created a need among IBM customers for high availability solutions greater than ever before.

In our effort to take the pulse of the high availability market at the start of 2012, we wanted to stimulate people's thinking but did not want to create such a rigid set of criteria that they would overlook a trend we hadn't considered. So we gave them a list of questions and suggested they consider them and write a short analysis of where they thought the market was heading. 

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.

Understand the factors that contribute to the cost of downtime and accurately calculate the impact to your organization's bottom line.

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article introduces the white paper "Assessing the Financial Impact of Downtime" available free from the MC White Paper Center.

With the ever-increasing reliance of businesses upon their IT systems and electronically stored business data comes an equivalent increase in management's duty to ensure due diligence and fiduciary responsibility with respect to protecting them against all causes of loss or damage. The potential costs of failing to do so can be enormous.

Package your existing applications for automatic deployment into clouds.

Written by Jarek Miszczyk

The vast majority of IT professionals today understand that cloud computing constitutes a fundamental paradigm shift in how the software solutions are marketed, distributed, and deployed. I contend that there are two fundamental features of cloud computing that will guarantee its success in the marketplace: self-service and automation.

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.