In Parts 1 and 2 of our IBM Power for Data Resiliency Series, we looked at why disaster recovery is important for today’s businesses and how to develop an effective disaster recovery plan. In the journey toward greater business resiliency, disaster recovery can be an entry point for achieving high availability.
While moving beyond disaster recovery to achieve high availability may take more steps and be more costly, reaching seamless business continuity is essential for maintaining your company’s reputation for reliability, trustworthiness, exceptional customer service, as well as avoiding interruptions to productivity that negatively impact profitability.
IBM Power can serve as a high availability platform that delivers close to 100% availability that companies need in this always-on era.
Built-in Redundancy
To achieve high availability, companies need redundancy in hardware, software, and network resources. Redundancy helps to limit single points of failure that might trigger unscheduled downtime. IBM Power supports high availability because redundancy is built into the platform.
The platform supports hardware redundancy through virtualization capabilities. With virtualization, redundancy can provide hardware failover capabilities that are automatic and allow for business operations to continue without interruption. By virtualizing available hardware components, you can design an operational platform that can better withstand outages or failures of individual adapters.
Also, IBM Power systems have redundancy for physical components that cannot be virtualized, such as system power supplies. Even when a critical unit, such as a power supply, does fail, it can often be replaced without powering down the system, keeping your business going.
At times, the redundancy model is to have another set of hardware available to take over the active workload. This model is prevalent in a highly available environment that might be clustered or may be a “warm” site that is ready to use a copy of the business data.
Continuous Data Availability
Companies can’t afford to lose much data after a disaster. To make crucial business decisions, they must have access to current, accurate, and complete information. Continued business operations benefit from data being kept up to date at both a primary and secondary location.
Disaster recovery restores saved data from media that captures a particular point in time, while high availability solutions enable data to be made available in a near real-time fashion. Data replication is used to copy data from one site to another across a communication pathway, ensuring that a secondary copy of data is as current as possible so that better recovery point objectives (RPOs) can be achieved.
Compared to disaster recovery, high availability solutions provide faster recovery times and narrower RPO windows. There are a variety of mechanisms and tools available to IBM Power Systems platforms that enable data to be replicated to another site, allowing a system transition to be completed in minutes or hours versus the day or more it may take to recover from media.
Even for companies with high data throughput, data can be replicated and sent to the recovery site with little to no impact on the IBM Power operating system platform. One example is the use of external storage-based replication. Data blocks are sent via the communications layer of the Storage Area Network (SAN) devices to a target SAN without installing any agent on the IBM Power system platform. Also, there are SAN based tools to assist in providing immutable copies of data that can be recovered in the event of data erasure or corruption, such as a cyberattack.
Automatic Failover
We find that, once our customers start evaluating their disaster recovery, they learn they can’t go for days without operating. Companies need to avoid long periods of downtime to achieve 24/7 operations. Reliable failover ensures that workloads are transferred to a secondary system after a failure at the primary location. Depending on the workloads and configuration, this failover can be streamlined to take place seamlessly for uninterrupted business operations.
After a traumatic incident, businesses can stay functional by running their systems at a secondary site. Companies that use IBM Power can have another platform on standby at a separate site for recovery. IBM Power high availability solutions can streamline your failover to resume business operations quickly. With some solutions, that failover can be automated as part of a cluster or as part of a remote (secondary) site that is able to take on the workload quickly.
Other solutions, such as IBM DB2 Mirror for I, can provide continuous database availability. This product performs database updates in 2 separate nodes synchronously over a high-speed network and remote direct memory access. Applications that access that data can then be deployed in an ‘active-active’ or ‘active-passive’ (read access on the secondary) mode. This type of availability is considered to be continuous, with an RTO of zero, keeping your business running without interruptions from downtime.
Reach Your High Availability Goals
High availability means maintaining business continuity as close to 100% of the time. To reach this goal, your company must be capable of avoiding planned and unplanned downtime. Moving to the IBM Power platform may be the best route to achieving this goal.
ProActive Solutions can work with your company to determine if IBM Power is the right solution for meeting your high availability goals. We have found that using IBM Power allows our customers to accelerate their recovery times significantly for continuous availability.
Is your company ready to make the move from disaster recovery to high availability? Ask for a consultation from one of the experts at ProActive.
If you haven’t already read Part 1 and Part 2 of our IBM Power for Business Resiliency Series.
