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

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.

If your business currently relies on an IBM i platform in combination with tape as its primary recovery option, you may be considering upgrading to a real-time solution that allows each transaction to be captured and instantly replicated to an onsite or offsite backup machine.

Selecting a solution that is effective and affordable is easy when you have a complete understanding of the most critical requirements for ensuring a successful HA/DR deployment. The goal of an HA/DR system is to help you avoid losing data and prevent damage to your business systems and marketplace reputation. Through this article, we think you will gain important insights into solution criteria that will enable you to choose the appropriate continuity solution.

HA and DR Options Are Available for Every Business

Do you manage a business that relies on applications running on the IBM i platform? How would a system failure affect customer service, order processing, or workplace productivity? Would your business come to a standstill? If your system crashed, would you lose data that might be difficult or impossible to recreate? Would an outage cause you to violate regulatory requirements for preserving records and risk triggering significant penalties?

If you're wrestling with similar questions, then you may be planning to upgrade your environment with a high availability and disaster recovery solution to ensure business continuity and data protection.

Determine How Availability Is Defined

Availability is the percentage of uptime a system is expected to deliver in a typical year. Recovery is the period of time required to restore a system or application after a planned or unplanned outage. A system can be designed for 90 percent availability, which may sound impressive until you realize 10 percent downtime equates to 36.5 days a year.

System operators often target availability at or above 99.9 percent (three nines). Three nines availability indicates that a system is designed for no more than 8.76 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Note that availability percentages can be somewhat misleading. For example, if one important application experiences downtime but the rest of a system is unaffected, an IT organization might maintain that the overall system is available.

Want to learn more? Download the complete white paper "Critical Elements for Successful Business Continuity" from the MC White Paper Center.

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