Business Continuity Series
 First in a series of four topic discussions on Business Continuity, High Availability and Disaster Recovery

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In this issue...
  • Feature: The Availability Continuum and Backup for iSeries
  • Spotlight: Who is Using or Looking at Linux?
  • From the Key e-Lab: ORION Express: Advance Report
  • KEY Definitions: Terms of the Month
    • Feature :.

    The Availability Continuum and Backup for iSeries

    PREMISE: As more advanced availability strategies are adopted, backup strategies must change to accommodate the newer strategies in order to maintain the integrity of the data and applications being protected and stay within regulatory compliance.

    The range of strategies for protection of data and applications is quite broad. This range of strategies is called the Availability Continuum. The basic availability strategies on this continuum for the iSeries, from lowest to highest degrees of protection, are shown below.

    UPS – Employing uninterrupted power supply protection to guard against spikes and short power failures.

    Nightly Backups – One common strategy employs tape subsystems, autoloaders, tape libraries, CD ROM jukeboxes (more common on PC networks). Week-night backups that save only the incremental changes since the prior day’s backup are replaced by comprehensive weekly backups over the weekend. Backup data is quickly removed to be safeguarded off-site, often at a DR services provider.

    Save Access Paths – This is a feature in the OS/400 backup operation. It slows the daily backup operation, but greatly speeds the restore process.

    Local Journaling – Use of the local journaling feature of OS/400 for saving all transactions.

    RAID5 – Redundant Array of Independent Disks - provides protection of multiple disk drive units through the use of data parity checking.

    Disk Mirroring – Full duplication of disks to guard against the failure of one or more disks.

    CPU Mirroring – High Availability (HA) software for mirroring critical data and applications to a separate target CPU.

    Cluster-enabled CPU Mirroring – HA software running on a network of iSeries servers that use clustering software.

    As you can see, basic backup processes are at the lower end of functionality in the whole array of data and application protection strategies. In fact, restore times for a system protected by Nightly Backups can range from 3-4 hours to up to a day or two depending on the size and complexity of the file structure to be restored and the operating system settings.

    UPS and Backup are strategies that must continue to be used in some form as the enterprise adopts more advanced strategies on the Availability Continuum. At the higher end of this Availability Continuum, the availability of data and applications increases, costs expended for that data and application protection increase, while the time available to recover from the loss of data and applications generally decreases.

    Related to this, the speed of the storage devices used in backup and restore processes plus the performance of CPU mirroring and clustering will all affect the information availability and recovery rates that are experienced.

    CONCLUSION: The best information safeguarding strategy for an organization’s data assets is based on an analysis of each stage of the Availability Continuum. Each point on this continuum represents a possible best-solution for an organization, based on the trade-off between costs, backup protection and availability.
    Spotlight:.

    Who is Using or Looking at Linux?

    Over half of the iSeries shops surveyed by iSeries Network use or are thinking of using Linux.

    1. We use iSeries Linux only for Web serving, file-and-print serving, and/or firewall -- 17 percent (43 responses).
    2. We run Linux business apps on the iSeries -- 6 percent (16 responses).
    3. We're looking into the possibilities for iSeries Linux -- 15 percent (38 responses).
    4. We'll restrict our Linux apps to a different platform -- 14 percent (36 responses).
    5. We see no need for Linux right now -- 48 percent (122 responses).
    Source: iSeries Network Newsletter, 1/12/03, Cheryl Ross, Ed.

    From the Key e-Lab:.

    ORION Express: Advance Report

     Vision Solutions will release a new version of their Vision Suite high availability software.its called ORION Express. Initially, there will be three versions: for OS/400, for Linux and for Windows Platforms. All of the versions will be able to be managed from a single, user-friendly, graphical interface. Vision Solutions is also currently in development on an AIX port of their high availability solution. Key features that distinguish this as a unique offering is the mix of capabilities, support and price for a highly affordable high availability solution.

    Full-fledged HA is available to any size organization. Both data and objects are replicated between servers using remote journaling (OS/400 users) and volume replication (Windows users). Role swaps between servers is possible, when workload on the primary server needs to be switched to the secondary server.

    A durable engine-based architecture provides a common interface and a single point of operation for scaling up to more sophisticated HA functionality and multi-platform support. You can learn more about ORION Express at Vision and Key's webinar described to the right of the masthead.

    KEY Definitions:.

    >From www.techweb.com/encyclopedia

    High Availability
    Also called "RAS" (reliability, availability, serviceability) or "fault resilient," it refers to a multiprocessing system that can quickly recover from a failure. There may be a minute or two of downtime while one system switches over to another, but processing will continue. This is not the same as fault tolerant, in which redundant components are designed for continuous processing without skipping a heartbeat.

    Key Information Systems, Inc., (www.keyisit.com) a Premier Business Partner with IBM, is a systems integration company located at 22120 Clarendon St., Suite 100, Woodland Hills, CA 91367, USA. Founded in 1995, the company provides corporate infrastructure architecture for business continuity, storage, and e-business solutions. Key Information Systems is a leading provider of IBM server solutions for the iSeries, AIX (UNIX), NT, and Linux platforms and has distinguished itself by extending its high availability infrastructure solutions to the Internet economy. The company delivers a complete range of professional services including education, maintenance, and IBM Global Financing. For more information, please visit the company online or call 1-877-442-3249.

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