Today, IT services are taken for granted. They’re expected to always be running. Consumers have little patience for service outages. However, many businesses equate a service outage with a natural disaster and give little thought to the possibility. After all, natural disasters are pretty rare, right? Maybe so. But service outages are not rare. In fact, they’re relatively common and they can be very costly when you consider data loss, sales loss and your operational costs. The most common causes of service outages are:
- Human error
- Software error
- Network error
So back to our problem. If people don’t think a service outage will happen, they don’t prepare for the possibility. Does this sound familiar? If so, it’s time to reevaluate. Even if your business does have a disaster recovery plan, it may not be adequate. Many businesses have this problem. Another problem is that, of the businesses that have disaster recovery plans, many have never tested their plans. Too many times these untested disaster recovery plans fail, with disastrous results. In fact, in a global survey covering 243 organizations, 40 percent admitted that their disaster recovery plan did not work in an actual disaster, according to The Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. What can you do? You need a service provider who establishes and follows best practices for storing, backing up and recovering your data and applications.
“How your service provider architects the cloud has the biggest impact on its resiliency,” says Sean Stenger, sales market director for LightEdge. LightEdge Enterprise Cloud is an economical alternative to public cloud servers that maintains business-critical performance and security in an ISO 20000 certified, ITIL best-practice managed environment. It combines server, network and storage into a package tailored to your company and designed to handle robust production workloads in a flexible, scalable format.
It’s important to take proactive steps to prevent outages, and even more crucial to ensure you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. Your business should follow a data protection model that includes: a production copy that is used daily, a local copy of that data on a different machine or storage appliance, and a third backup located geographically off site. With LightEdge solutions, there is no need to own or manage the second storage facility yourself.
At the core of any emergency preparedness plan is a facility that will maintain operations during an unplanned outage. LightEdge data centers are designed to provide:
- N+1 redundancy on every main component
- Multiple power feeds provide redundant loop connectivity
- Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and backup diesel generators
- Multiple carriers and physically diverse connection points to ensure network availability
We even have a worksite recovery option in the event that business can’t be done out of your office.
“With a virtual server from LightEdge, everything is highly available from top to bottom and there will always be two copies of it running with double resources allocated to it,” says Stenger. Traditional backup solutions allow you to recover files and folders, but not applications and operating systems. And this limited recovery could take days—more time than any business can afford to lose. An estimated 50 percent of organizations have inadequate disaster recovery plans and may not survive a significant outage of critical IT services, according to The Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. “Our virtual servers can have your business back up and running within 15 minutes… not in hours or even days,” assures Stenger.
Disaster Recovery for AS400/iSeries
According to LightEdge Sales Engineering Manager Roger Mellman, user error is the most common cause of outages on AS400, followed by problems with older hardware. “It’s important to understand your risks and have a plan to mitigate them,” says Mellman. “For instance, never upgrade an application or perform any user modification without a backup,” adds Mellman. LightEdge uses Vision Solutions‘s MIMIX real-time replication tool. It is designed specifically for IBM Power and IBM i OS systems, providing a unique backup and disaster recovery solution to the iSeries world.
No matter what your business needs for its disaster recovery plan, LightEdge can tailor a solution for you from our full suite of business resiliency options from the industry’s most respected and innovative backup and replication providers. We are committed to keeping your IT operations, critical applications and data protected. We have the resources required to get your business back to a production state in the most efficient way possible.
