In a tightening economy, it's more critical than ever to protect one of the most important assets a company has: its data.
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?
Why Gamble?
Is it the confidence that the IBM iSeries platform will never down, or perhaps is it the "we have never had a failure; it won't happen to us" mentality? Just as we hope to never use our homeowner's insurance, we hope we are never required to re-build our systems. That said, most would agree that homeowner's insurance is a responsibility we have for protecting our families. Data protection and recoverability should be viewed the same way: a responsibility we have for protecting our businesses.
Other reasons businesses might run this risk are the perceived costs of data availability and recovery solutions or the belief that the technologies they have in place are effective solutions for protecting their mission-critical data.
The responsibility of mitigating this risk has typically been placed in the hands of the IT department to make sure applications can be recovered within a defined recovery time objective (RTO). However, with the increase in government and industry regulations and the company's responsibility to its shareholders, senior management has begun taking the lead and setting the guidelines, based on the business' goals and objectives. They are the ones who need to determine how long their applications can be unavailable without significantly effecting business operations. Imagine not having your email or primary business applications for a couple of hours--or even a couple of days--in today's hectic workplace. Rest assured that executives in most organizations never say, "We can be down for three or four days."
Your Options
There are many data availability and recovery options available in the market. How do you determine which one is the best fit for your business?
Tape Backup and Offsite Storage
Dedicated tape backup and offsite media storage is probably the most popular method used by organizations today for the protection and recovery of their data and applications. Using tape backup solutions has become common practice for most organizations. However, tape backup can present many challenges: tapes can get damaged, lost, or stolen, and the time required to access tapes from storage can be significant.
High Availability Solutions
High availability (HA) solutions are another option on the market. HA software vendors have worked closely with IBM and the channel to promote dedicated replication solutions. This is the best way to recover applications and ensure 24/7 availability. The problem is that high availability solutions are complex, imposing maintenance and communications issues for IT departments, and have traditionally instilled little confidence in their reliability by the businesses using them.
Managed High Availability Services
To take the mystery and maintenance out of managing iSeries replication, another option is a managed HA service. Most problems that arise are not related directly to the HA software or the iSeries platform. Issues are usually caused by a lack of ongoing maintenance and communications problems.
Having a managed HA solution for a monthly fee, backed by a strong service-level agreement (SLA), will provide the confidence to a business that replication is stable and always "switch-ready." The burden for maintaining the second system, the communications, and the offsite location is assumed by the provider.
Electronic Vaulting
Electronic vaulting is a great way to leverage encryption and block-level change technology to move data to a secure offsite "vault." It is becoming one of the more popular and reliable approaches for backing up data. The problem with this option is that it's only half the equation for adequate recovery.
Electronic Vaulting with Recovery
An option for those companies that do not require the 24-hours-or-less recovery time capabilities of a high availability solution is an offsite backup solution that provides great data protection as well as data and application recovery. The reason is that, unless you have access to an iSeries platform with appropriate OS levels, etc., it's only backup, not recovery.
By combining LAN speed restores to a "standby" iSeries, a user can be backed up and in business in less than 10 hours. Recovery services and availability of an adequate inventory of iSeries is the key to success and meeting the corporate mandate for 24 hours or less.
Why Gamble?
Statistics show that a large percentage of companies that lose their data due to a system failure don't remain in business for long. Why take that gamble with your business? There are a variety of solutions on the market that both protect and recover your data and meet a range of recovery time objectives. Take a step back and determine what your company's recovery requirements are and then find the option that is right for you. In a tightening economy, it's more critical than ever to protect one of the most important assets a company has: its data.
To learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of each of these data backup and recovery solutions, download the complete white paper.
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