You never know! This week Atlanta was paralyzed by snow. In late 2012, New York and New Jersey were overtaken by Sandy. Weather can be a factor anywhere and if you’re not properly prepared your business can suffer. Having the right safeguards in place to protect your data and systems from failure can be the difference in the success and profitability of your company.
Despite what you would expect, weather and other natural or man-made disasters only account for about 10% of system outages. The other 90% of system outages are a result of planned downtime for routine maintenance, software upgrades, etc. The challenge is that IT professionals must take their evenings and weekends for this system downtime and with businesses operating in a 24/7 world today, uptime is increasingly important.
High availability solutions can solve these challenges and keep IT environments resilient. IBM PowerHA SystemMirror is an excellent example of a solution that requires little management. It is an IBM storage-based clustering solution that addresses storage and high availability requirements. Data and applications are deployed into storage pools. IASPs can be deployed using either internal or external storage. At any time the nodes in the cluster can switch roles and become either a primary or secondary mode. PowerHA SystemMirror is designed and intended to be used on demand role swap operations. This allows a business to continue while system maintenance is being performed, for example. The impact of planned outages can be minimized with such solutions.
