Extend and Enhance the Availability Protection of IBM PowerHA for i

Augment and complete the availability protection provided by IBM PowerHA solutions

Disasters happen. Your organization is not immune. They don’t happen often. In fact, they are extremely rare, but all companies must prepare for the worst even while they hope for the best.

Yet disasters aren’t the only availability threats. Hardware and software failures also cause outages. And essential server maintenance—including nightly backups, hardware and software upgrades, and more—occurs much more frequently.  What’s more, unlike disasters, good fortune won’t save you from the need for planned maintenance events. Regular maintenance is essential to continue to serve evolving business needs and deal with technology issues.

Protecting your business from downtime, whether planned or unplanned, requires making one or more copies of the data and maintaining this copy or copies at a distance sufficient to account for the threat that you want to countervail.  This copy may either be maintained in real time on a recovery server that is always ready to assume responsibility for production operations or it may require an action to restore the environment to the original.

There are three basic technologies employed to provide high availability or disaster recovery protection for a business IT environment. The first is periodic tape saves, which in today’s fast-paced world is barely enough protection to qualify for disaster recovery because too much data can be lost between
periodic saves.

This leaves a choice of two techniques that provide real-time replication: either replication of changed hardware sectors in a storage subsystem, with recovery of the server from the copy of the storage subsystem, or replication of data changes to a recovery server, allowing a quick switch to the waiting server.

IBM® PowerHA® SystemMirror® for i addresses the need for high availability by replicating hardware sectors from a source storage subsystem to a matching sector address on a target storage subsystem. At the point of a failover from the production server to a recovery server, the target storage subsystem is
attached to the recovery server and the business environment is recovered.

Assure MIMIX HA is a logical replication solution that delivers high availability by replicating data changes at the conclusion of each transaction and immediately applying them to a recovery server. At the point of a failover, the recovery server is available without further action or recovery steps.

This white paper explores storage subsystem-based replication technology and explains how Assure MIMIX for PowerHA uses technology to augment and complete the protection provided by IBM PowerHA solutions.  Learn more.