The New Realities of Business

An Industry Insight feature with Vision Solutions

Organisations cannot afford to ignore the importance of disaster recovery and should the worse happen information availability is critical, says Alexander Trekin.

Today’s real-time reality for business is that if a system goes down, your operations stop. The unavailability ­­– or downtime – of applications and databases cannot be ignored. Downtime now affects business profitability as well as productivity. 

• Globalisation and eBusiness mean 24/7 operation. There is no "end of the day."
• Outages are not localized. Today's just-in-time delivery means that one system outage can impact the entire enterprise.
• Transactions are increasingly electronic, with less paper documentation and human involvement.
• Database growth means maintenance, data backups and batch processing can no longer be accommodated in off-hour windows.

There’s a new reality, however. With an advanced, easy to install and manage software from Vision Solutions, IT staff has an information availability solution that enables continuous, optimum availability and switch-ability. Vision Solutions high availability and disaster recovery tools reduce the risk and administrative IT environment challenges and can easily configure to fit a wide range of topologies. They take remote journaling to the next level of efficiency with more capabilities to optimize processing resources without additional management time.

To solve the realities of business, Vision Solutions technologies can make an ideal option to:

• Deliver maximum uptime and zero data loss for the business.
• Provide real-time information for more responsive business decisions.
• Switch systems on demand to completely eliminate planned downtime whenever application and server maintenance is required on production systems.
• Respond within seconds to unexpected system or server outages with one-step failover to the backup server.

Automation ensures confidence

High availability (HA) solutions vary significantly in the level of sophisticated automation and autonomics they incorporate – as well as the ability of the automation and autonomics to remain efficient and invisible to the operator over the long term. As a general rule: the more automation and autonomics, the less operator time involved and the healthier your overall HA environment.

Of particular importance in maintaining confidence in the active/active HA infrastructure is how well the availability software validates the data is always in sync. Auditing technology is critical to the success of the active/active HA infrastructure. For example, when something changes in the IT environment, most solutions will not automatically notice the change. This may become a serious issue in the future.

Turning downtime into new productivity

Many businesses now view their high availability solutions as a way to add new value on a daily basis. No longer viewed just as an insurance policy against a potential disaster, companies are using HA to generate quantifiable and documented return on investment. Maintaining a switch-ready HA environment over time, and in spite of changes within your infrastructure, requires a combination of IBM’s advanced autonomics technology with innovations that provide a self-managing, self-healing, self-auditing – even adaptively self-learning solution. These essential ingredients ensure high availability solutions remain switch-ready today and every day.

About Vision Solutions

Vision Solutions, Inc. is the world’s leading global provider of high availability, disaster recovery and data management solutions for IBM Power Systems. Vision keeps critical businesses information continuously protected and available. The company’s products ensure business continuity, increase productivity, reduce operating costs and satisfy compliance requirements.

Alexander Trekin is Vision Solutions’ Sales Director for Russia, CIS and MENA. For more information, call +44-207-5152169 or +44-7920-026185. You may also e-mail alexander.trekin@visionsolutions.com.