Since firms are being held to a higher standard of high availability, the challenge for most is to design server and storage systems that are truly continuous and that guard against unplanned downtime. That means high availability, long associated with application/system uptime, is evolving to include the service of data availability. Aberdeen uses two key performance criteria to distinguish Best in Class (BIC) companies that leverage a high availability strategy: the overall ability to recover critical applications within a short window and year-over-year improvement in ability to recover data.

AberdeenGroup has embarked on a survey of end-users, in different job roles and across numerous industry sectors, to gain insight into customers’ data protection strategies. About 100 customers were surveyed and the results revealed that disaster recovery, business continuance and traditional backup/restore and legal discovery mandates make up the three top drivers behind customers’ data protection strategies, while a whopping 72% of respondents surveyed cited a “tight IT budget” is the top roadblock they encounter in addressing their data protection business drivers.

A set of highly automated System i management and optimization tools can reduce the strain on the IT department, while ensuring timely performance of vital management and optimization tasks. But before you can set out to evaluate the tools available to undertake this automation, you must first have a clear understanding of what needs to be done. This white paper examines some of the areas that you need to address in order to ensure healthy System i operations that deliver the highest possible performance.

Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From IT departments to the Board Room, managers have seen the importance of business uptime and data protection to continued success, productivity and profitability.

This white paper will provide a road map to the most effective strategies and technologies to protect data and provide fast recovery should data be lost or corrupted due to accident or malicious action.

This paper presents an overview of iSeries high availability to companies that are beginning to explore this powerful business continuity technology. The critical components of high availability solutions are detailed in this paper, including data replication engines, system monitors, role swap capabilities, and the importance of autonomic processes. Also provided is information on the cost of planned and unplanned downtime, and a brief overview of disaster recovery strategies.

IT managers have been or soon will be tasked to find ways to eliminate or reduce the adverse impact of downtime on the business. Recent events have shown that disaster recovery plans and data replication alone are often not enough. This white paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity—from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution. Readers can quickly match their specific optimum uptime objectives with the easiest and most cost-effective IT strategy.

This white paper shows you how a software-based data replication solution can drive value by providing simplified, on-demand enterprise-wide data sharing and right-time data integration for any business. We’ll review how such a solution can easily enable data replication from and between today’s most popular databases and every organization’s nightmare: legacy databases.

For AIX IT departments looking to take the next step in data protection strategies, CDP is an essential consideration. Analysts agree that businesses will be incorporating this strategy in the next few years as part of an integrated solution. CDP enables you to reverse data corruption in a fraction of the time and labor required for recovery from tape. It doesn’t require planned downtime for backups and recovers data instantly at the push of a button. Whether as a standalone solution or integrated into an HA solution, CDP provides the easiest, most effective protection against the loss of critical data.

Over the past five years, some of the most wide-ranging and demanding financial management and disclosure regulations in U.S. history have come into force such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts. Not complying with these regulations may have serious consequences for you and your financial services institution. The goals of this white paper are to explain the impact of specific regulations on information availability and to give an overview of the range of solutions available. It also offers straightforward guidance on how to develop an effective Information Availability strategy.

What if you could immediately tap into the unused value that exists within your IT infrastructure? This white paper explores how the power of an information availability solution can unlock the latent potential of your IT environment and deliver new value for your organization. It includes an“Action Worksheet” to use in discussions with your IT executives. If your bank can minimize or eliminate planned downtime, it can free up specific, measurable (currently unrealized) potential that can immediately support your revenue and asset growth, competitive positioning, M&A plans and customer-facing initiatives.

This white paper shows you how a software-based data replication solution can drive value by providing simplified, on-demand enterprise-wide data sharing and right-time data integration for any business. We’ll review how such a solution can easily enable data replication from and between today’s most popular databases and every organization’s nightmare: legacy databases.

Due to its integration into every aspect of your business, any lack of availability of your SAP® application, or its underlying data, represents a serious threat to your ability to deliver your products and services to your customers. But time and effort are required to protect both the application and data through regular backups and maintenance, while also ensuring that unplanned business interruptions don’t mean business catastrophe! This white paper will review the unique issues related to High Availability and Disaster Recovery in your SAP environment, including 2- and 3-tier architectures, and guide you in developing appropriate SAP data and application management strategies.

With the ever-increasing reliance of businesses upon their IT systems and electronically stored business data comes an equivalent increase in management’s duty to ensure due diligence and fiduciary responsibility with respect to protecting them against all causes of loss or damage. The potential costs of failing to do so can be enormous. This white paper will address the assessment of threats to your IT operations, inclusive of systems, applications, and data, and will guide you through the process of developing solid numbers around the potential costs they represent.

Continuous member service is an important deliverable for credit unions, and is probably the most obvious sign to members that a credit union has its priorities set appropriately. While data recovery has always been important, there are trends in the industry today that put your data recovery strategy in the spotlight. The continued growth in assets and members means that the impact of downtime is affecting a larger base and is therefore potentially much more costly. Combined with the trend towards consolidation, the cost of downtime may in fact be prohibitive. And depending upon the size of your credit union, certain regulatory requirements for data retention and disaster recovery may be adding fuel to this fire.

Planning for recovery is a requirement in businesses of all sizes. Business requirements are not the only mandates that may be driving the evolution of your recovery plan. Various industry-specific regulatory mandates, including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and SEC, specify requirements for data retention and recoverability. In meeting these requirements, businesses have to deal with a variety of risks to data: inadvertently deleted files or records (operator error), viruses or hackers that can cause data corruption or deletion, and natural disasters that may put much more than just your data at risk. Do you have a plan that meets your recovery requirements across these areas?

Until recently, System i high availability solutions were reserved mostly for large enterprises. Now that high availability is dramatically easier to use and less expensive to own and manage, the picture has changed. Read about what has changed in both the technology as well as the marketplace that has make it possible for small and mid-sized companies to cost-justify the “luxury” of rapid and complete data recovery.

Companies that rely on financial management and ERP applications are realizing that ongoing archiving can provide a long-term solution to the problem of accelerating database growth. Advanced Data Archiving is required to achieve effective, sustainable Data Lifecycle Management. This white paper explores the key issues driving the need for more effective and manageable data archiving and provides a roadmap to sustainable data management that also yields measurable ROI.

The ability to deliver and assure optimum availability to clinical systems and data will be critical to the success of healthcare and life sciences organizations. As providers become increasingly dependent on automated patient record and medical delivery technologies, they must keep those applications, databases and networks available and accessible—no matter what.

This white paper shows how Vision Solutions’s MIMIX® Information Availability solutions ensure the availability and accessibility of data and applications, regardless of planned or unplanned interruptions. They transform costly unproductive downtime into value producing uptime and help IT managers solve the challenges of automated patient care and compliance.

More than most other organizations on the planet, retailers thrive on accessible, available information. Any interruption in these applications and technologies or in the free-flow of information can—and will—compromise your ability to sell merchandise. Retailers must meet this real-time information availability challenge or more nimble competitors will.

Availability doesn’t just happen. This white paper describes how availability software, like Lakeview Technology’s MIMIX information availability solutions, eliminate planned and unplanned downtime and ensure that retail data and applications remain available even in the face of disasters or hardware and software failures or during inevitable maintenance periods.

As an executive running a business that never sleeps, it is a must for your IT environment to be available 24/7. From player point systems and coinless slots to RFID and casino management applications, new technologies are changing the way you do business. This white paper provides an overview of information availability solutions for gaming organizations. Find out how to use information availability to cut costs, improve customer services and solve your data protection challenges. Discover strategies that could make the difference for your gaming organization.

IT systems have become as valuable to the transportation industry as eighteen-wheelers, freighters, buses, and airplanes. When IT systems fail or data is inaccessible, deliveries are lost or delayed, equipment sits idle, customer satisfaction falls and the profitability of the transportation company declines.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how an information availability solution helps transportation companies fulfill their commitments to customers and maximize business performance by keeping IT systems protected and available. 

This white paper explores how the power of an information availability solution can unlock the latent potential of your IT environment and deliver new value for your organization. It can enable your organization to immediately tap into the unused value—downtime—that exists within your IT infrastructure.

This white paper explores how the power of an information availability solution can transform that non-productive, non-profitable downtime into the optimum level of value-producing business uptime for your organization. First, by eliminating or minimizing disruptions from planned system downtime; second, by eliminating or minimizing delays and latency from your information and business processes, speeding up the ability of your employees, customers or partners to act—to buy, to decide, to analyze, to share, to market, to deliver on time, to service, to expand and to profit. You’ll also find the worksheets you’ll need to discuss these issues with your business unit and IT executives.