Disclaimer: iSeries and AS400 are servers. IBM I is an operating system. I use these terms interchangeably to make it easy for folks to find this kind of information on the web.
It May Not Be Structured That Way But It Sure Feels Like It.
Sooner or later, your company will need to recover from downtime, and guess who’ll be the “blame-ee.”
OK, time for a reality check. You Either Have A Recovery Plan Or You Don’t.
If You Do Have A Recovery Plan, Are You Sure It Will Work?
IBM reports 75% of all businesses with recovery plans do not conduct regular recovery testing. But even if things go as planned, how realistic is the plan? Industry studies document that when downtime strikes, 33% of all recoveries do not go as expected.
Can You Afford To Be Down For More Than 24 Hours – And Recover With Data That Is 36-48+ Hours Old?
Traditional recovery plans generally rely on the availability of a hot site. But even with annual testing, hot site recovery usually takes 1–3 days to get back up and running. 80% of data inaccessibility is due to human error, which can take 2–3 days to recover from traditional backup tapes. In the meantime, you feel powerless.
Are You Paying Too Much For An Old Plan That Won’t Deliver?
The truth is you’re probably paying way too much for a plan that won’t deliver. But the good news is that costs have dropped sharply. Whatever system you have in place now, you may be paying more in annual maintenance than the total cost of a state-of-the-art replacement that offers far greater reliability, regular testing and much faster recovery – in minutes not days.
What If You Don’t Yet Have A Recovery Plan?
That means you probably rely on backup tapes.
Industry studies show that recovery from tape backup fails 50% of the time. Most multi-server environments rely on a combination of software and a tape library to back up critical data. As these environments grow, the backups become more complicated, which makes recovery even trickier.
Too Often Complete Recovery Goes Untested
Rarely do these users ever test a complete backup. And when the unexpected strikes we have heard stories that recovery winds up taking 1–3 weeks. How long can your business tolerate mission critical business application downtime? What is the cost of downtime if you cannot recover in 4 hours? 12 Hours? 24 Hours? 2 Days? Longer?
Even more significant – studies show that 70% of businesses that suffer major data loss are out of business within 2 years.
Cloud Hosting And New Technology Makes Recovery In Minutes An Affordable Reality
Bottom Line: Cloud Hosting and newer recovery technology—which includes high-availability, fault tolerant failover, virtualized storage and a virtualized tape library—is less expensive than what businesses currently pay for hot site availability with 1–3 day recoverability. For smaller users, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is affordable.
Need Help?
Call us at 714-593-0387 or email me at blosey@source-data.com.
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