How DRaaS Enhances IBM Power Systems’ Resiliency

When managing an IBM Power Systems workload, you must consider the impact of downtime on that workload. The longer the outage, the higher the cost to your organization. There is no shortage of threats driving downtime: equipment failures, cybercrime, power and network outages, and mother nature. How much downtime can your business afford? How much data can you afford to lose?

Fortunately, a good disaster recovery (DR) solution can mitigate downtime as well as ensure your organization’s cyber resilience during a disaster or cyberattack.

Disaster Recovery solutions vary considerably, with the best ones capable of recovering nearly 100% of applications and data. However, the better the Disaster Recovery solution, the more costly and labor-intensive it tends to be. Traditional Disaster Recovery requires:

• investments in on or off-site data centers
• servers and other hardware
• Disaster Recovery software licenses
• and IT staff with DR expertise

Another option for Disaster Recovery is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a complete recovery environment in the cloud, enabling rapid failover and recovery. The infrastructure and DR environment are owned and managed by the DRaaS provider. Organizations pay a monthly fee to maintain their recovery site, including ongoing data replication and disaster recovery testing. 

We know this is the case for x86 environments but is this still true for environments based on IBM Power Systems? In this post, we explore how DRaaS works for IBM Power Systems as an effective approach to protecting critical systems. 

Does DRaaS work for IBM Power Systems?

DRaaS for IBM Power Systems environments is like DRaaS for x86 environments. A managed DRaaS solution is hosted and maintained on IBM Power Systems servers within secure data centers. With this solution, customers get the benefit of a managed Disaster Recovery environment with IBM hardware and expertise. All at a fraction of the cost of a private DR solution.

IBM supports several methods for replicating data, including logical replication, SAN to SAN, or virtual tape libraries (VTL).

• Logical replication, which makes use of IBM’s built-in journaling capabilities, continuously copies the most recent data to the recovery site. It’s possible to capture data and transactions almost immediately after they’re written to the production environment.
• SAN to SAN replication in the cloud is a slightly lower-cost method often used for large volumes of data. Transactions written to the local SAN are copied to a remote virtual SAN in the provider’s cloud.
• Virtual tape replication is digital, virtual disk space designed to emulate tape drives but faster.

Any of those data replication technologies can be used in a DRaaS-for-IBM environment.

The cost of DRaaS will depend mainly on how much data, and how fast, an organization needs to recover. Different businesses have different recovery needs. An e-commerce company will want to recover every last transaction, while a brick and mortar furniture store might be able to lose a few hours of transactions without substantially hurting business.

If you need to get your IT systems restored within minutes: you’ll pay more for it than if you can wait an hour or so.

If you can’t afford to lose more than a second or so of data: your DRaaS costs will be higher than someone willing to lose an hour’s worth of data.

The value of managed DRaaS for IBM Power Systems

Managing your own Disaster Recovery environment is possible, but costly and time-consuming. It gets more costly and time-consuming the better the Disaster Recovery environment. Experiencing any of these scenarios with your in-house IBM Power Systems environment?

• Infrastructure costs for power, space, and equipment are growing
• IT budgets are constantly shrinking
• Finding IBM expertise is challenging. Finding staff with IBM and Disaster Recovery expertise is even more challenging.

Managed DRaaS providers can take the burden of infrastructure costs (while turning your cap-ex costs into op-ex costs), right-size a DR solution for your business with your budget in mind and provide that IBM expertise – all so your IT staff can focus on other IT projects important to your organization.

Get Help with Disaster Recovery for IBM Power Systems

DRaaS helps businesses optimize data resiliency and risk management. With our partners, we provide IBM Disaster Recovery Service for IBM Power Systems. Our service offers real-time replication and continuous monitoring, as well as IBM and DRaaS experts to assist in disaster recovery planning and service selection. Together, we handle maintenance, hardware upgrades, software licenses, storage, networking, hybrid cloud environments, and monitoring to create a seamless DRaaS experience for our customers. 

Learn more about IBM Disaster Recovery and DRaaS for IBM Power Systems.

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