CDP provides the easiest and most effective protection against the loss of critical business data.

By Chris Thomas

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from the white paper "Benefits of CDP Technology in i5/OS and AIX Environments," which you can download free from the MC White Paper Center.

Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business. From IT departments to the boardroom, managers understand that business uptime and data protection relate directly to productivity and profitability. This article explains effective strategies and technologies to protect data and to provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.

When investigating clustering technology, embrace the Vision.

By Thomas M. Stockwell

Last month, Vision Solutions announced the integration of its Vision Cluster1 solution with IBM's Systems Director Navigator.

Cluster1 is Vision Solutions' unique cluster management solution for System i, but many customers are still a bit confused about the differences between the use of clusters on the System i and the traditional use of clusters in the UNIX or Linux environment. 

Thomas M. Stockwell, on behalf of MC Press Online, conducted an interview with Craig Johnson, Vice President for Research and Development at Vision Solutions, investigating how the Vision Cluster1 solution addresses these concerns.

Everyone loses data sooner or later, but preparation can serve as inexpensive insurance.

By Chris Smith

Have you ever noticed how some of the most interesting stuff winds up in your junk email folder?

Emails come in from all over the world and wind up right there in your personal email junk folder. These messages, written usually in variants of English, though I have seen some in Chinese, promise everything from great jobs, where you will have to work only two or three hours a day, to relationships with lonely women who supposedly got your name somewhere, to flawless replica watches, to human growth products designed to make you more appealing in a world where size matters.

The importance of preserving data combined with the inconvenience inherent in most backup solutions leaves room for new contenders.

By Chris Smith

I've chronicled my frustrations with backup software, but there's a new kid on the block. You'll like the kid's cache, too, when I explain the opportunity (deal) we have arranged for readers of MC TNT Tips 'N Techniques.

By Dr. Andrew Winkler

Lose data, lose your job. Since 93 percent of data-intensive businesses that lose their data go out of business, it's not surprising that data loss is such a big career killer. And it's only natural that we have built a massive infrastructure around preserving data at all costs: raid arrays and tape libraries and snapshot file systems and offsite storage and online storage.... So massive, in fact, that it is collapsing under its own weight.

Touted for reducing energy consumption and making efficient use of servers and floor space, virtualization can also be the foundation for a smart DR plan.

By Chris Smith

I don't know whether it's because of improved communications of the 21st century (which has raised our awareness), population increases, or just bad luck, but it seems that there are more disasters lately than there were a few years back. I guess when you grasp the full significance of our clinging to a little ball--the Earth--wobbling around in a very unfriendly void, you can't help but feel a little insecure.

Replication is available in two generic flavors, hardware-level and logical. Yum. But which should you choose? It all depends. Or you can have it all.

By Bill Hammond

Replication is a familiar thread in the modern information technology infrastructure fabric. It serves a number of purposes, including the following:

•·    Provide for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) by creating real-time or near real-time replicas of production databases, files, system values, and applications. This is probably the most prominent replication use but certainly not the only one.

•·    Integrate applications at the data level by sharing information among application databases.

•·    Stock data warehouses and data marts by copying data into them from operational databases.

•·    Improve load balancing by creating a secondary data store that can support read-only operations. Depending on the type of replication used, this can be an automatic supplementary benefit of HA replication.

By Chris Smith

If you think that meeting compliance standards has been difficult and that once you get there your chances for protecting your organization's information assets are assured, you may be missing a crucial point.