Companies can be back running in less than an hour with no hardware investment.
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.
The service is expected to appeal to 20 percent or more of System i (AS/400) users who need a near-term recovery point objective (RPO) and a short recovery time objective (RTO). While the guaranteed one hour is an outside limit of how long it will take VAULT400 to get the customer's system back online, Maximum Availability notes that its software can execute a role swap in only four minutes.
VAULT400 announced earlier that it was planning to offer a managed high availability solution, but it didn't say how it was going to accomplish this or what vendor it would team up with to make it happen.
"We find the people at Maximum Availability easy to work with, and they clearly see this type of service as complementary to their high availability offerings," said Jim Kandrac, president of United Computer Group, parent of VAULT400.
Kandrac says the Managed Service High Availability is a service that fits neatly between vaulted backups or tape and instantaneous high availability. With the latter, a customer generally needs a second target computer and an IBM i operator trained in backup and role-swap procedures.
"We recently received a call from an end user whose firm was using another HA solution," Kandrac says. "The company had spent nearly a million dollars on equipment and training but couldn't ensure that it would have high availability when they needed it because their trained System i staff kept leaving," he says. "With this solution, VAULT400 manages the customer's high availability, and the company doesn't need an operator trained in HA since *noMAX is easy to use."
Simon O'Sullivan, senior vice president of Maximum Availability, says the partnership with VAULT400 is a way to meet the needs of customers who may need an HA solution but aren't interested in assuming the cost and responsibility of additional equipment or trained people.
"Companies that are under staffing constraints, or that aren't prepared to buy additional equipment now to do hardware replication, will find this solution appealing because they will have a robust high availability solution that they can pay for on a monthly basis," O'Sullivan says. He notes that because of data coming in from the Web, daily tape backups are becoming perceived as insufficient to meet changing recovery point objectives, and high availability solutions are finding greater appeal among a broader cross-section of businesses. In addition, servers running IBM i have come down in price over the last five years, making HA more affordable, whether it's managed by the customer or by a company such as VAULT400.
O'Sullivan says Maximum Availability already has other data centers in Australia, Germany, and the UK offering regional customers high availability services through a data center using its *noMAX software, as well as Sungard PS offering it to its public sector software customers out of Orlando, Fla. It will be announcing other data center-managed HA application service provider (ASP) agreements soon in the U.S.
Maximum Availability recently introduced its *noMAX Subscription Edition line of products that allow customers to pay a quarterly or annual subscription fee that covers the cost of software, updates, and support as well as Web-based user training and periodic oversight of their *noMAX environment by experienced *noMAX technicians.
The VAULT400 Managed Service High Availability, while likely slightly more expensive per month than the *noMAX subscription service, also offers more in that the redundant operating system and applications are running on VAULT400 hardware in a dedicated LPAR managed by VAULT400 personnel. O'Sullivan believes that if a customer were to factor in the burdened costs, it might be even less than hosting the HA target solution in-house.
"Each customer has different needs, and some people are ready to upgrade their older iSeries box anyway, creating an extra computer suitable for HA replication," says Kandrac. "Our goal is to provide each customer with the right solution that best fits their individual requirements."
Kandrac notes that VAULT400's other backup solutions--which offer either 12- or 24-hour RTOs, including its DR Quick Ship program--complement its *noMAX-enabled Managed Service High Availability solution. The vaulted backups can substitute for tapes, which can be cumbersome and unreliable and are often unsecured or unencrypted. High availability can keep you up and running, but backups can restore lost data and provide archival retentions. The average VAULT400 client retains 24 or more save sets--five dailies, four weeklies, 12 monthlies, and up to seven annuals.
"We've never suggested that high availability is a substitute for tape," says O'Sullivan. "If an operator were to delete a file, it's deleted on the HA target machine as well. But backing up your data to a data center such as those operated by VAULT400 has a lot of advantages."
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