Migrating to a virtual system to consolidate servers can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive job that places your data at risk, but it doesn't have to be.

Written by Henry Martinez

The benefits of using virtual systems to consolidate physical hardware have been widely discussed and generally accepted. Server consolidation can reduce hardware costs, software-licensing fees, power consumption, HVAC costs, and the burden of server management and maintenance. In addition, a single physical server containing multiple virtual severs can be easier to secure than multiple physical systems.

The *noMAX HA/DR solution from Maximum Availability ensures unmatched data integrity and optimal recovery time for the IBM System i.

Written by Michael Stuhlreyer

In today's highly competitive global marketplace, it is a business imperative to ensure the continuity of critical business operations and to protect a company's information assets. This makes business continuity an essential objective for companies of all sizes. Businesses must satisfy themselves that they have a comprehensive high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution in place.

Still the leading industry technology for archiving data, magnetic tape gets a boost from researchers in Switzerland and Japan, who say it's much greener than disk.

Written by Chris Smith

If you are one of those people who has resisted the move to back up everything to disk because you just like knowing you have a tape offsite that has all the company's data going back to the Vietnam War, then take heart; you have just been given a new lease on life with a breakthrough in tape technology.

Organizations often view an investment in DR as insurance, but that perspective may blind them to the returns available from investments in advanced DR solutions.

Written by Jeff Ashman

Expenditures on disaster recovery (DR) solutions are frequently considered a cost of doing business, not an investment. Or they may be viewed as insurance policies that, hopefully, will never be called on to pay out claims. From this perspective, it's difficult to justify more than the minimum expenditure that will provide "good enough," but not necessarily optimal, protection against losses due to a disaster.

Businesses evolve and grow. Technologies advance. Consequently, organizations need dynamic infrastructures that allow them to quickly react to change.

Written by Craig Johnson

Repetition breeds complacency. As a result, after decades of reiteration, some people no longer pay as much attention as they should to the old saying, "the only constant is change." But, for better or worse, the last couple of years, which carried us over a peak and into a low valley in the economy, have made the truth of that adage abundantly clear.

Crossroads Systems' virtual tape appliance for IBM i promises to dramatically shorten backup times.
Written by Chris Smith

The COMMON Directions and Focus educational conferences were held this week, and about 200 users attended the converged Indianapolis events. About 20 vendors also supported the show by sending representatives to explain, and in some cases demonstrate, their products during the one-day exhibition.

Virtualization has multiple meanings and purposes. Learn how you can use it to increase data and application availability.

Written by Bill Hammond
Virtualization can serve a number of valuable purposes in IT departments, but exactly what is virtualization?

There are at least two definitions of the term. Server virtualization allows multiple logical servers--possibly using different operating systems--to run on a single physical machine. On IBM Power Systems, server virtualization services are provided primarily through PowerVM. Its hypervisor can run multiple instances of IBM i, AIX, and Linux in separate partitions on a single physical system.

HACMP and data replication each serve different needs in the high availability and disaster recovery arenas. Combining the two delivers the best of both worlds.

Written by Rich Krause

Many AIX shops protect the availability of their applications by using IBM's High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) to closely link multiple servers connected to shared storage. HACMP monitors the health of the cluster and can automatically recover applications and system resources on a secondary server if the primary server is unavailable. Because the cluster typically operates in a shared-disk environment, as depicted in Figure 1, failover times are very short in this scenario because the failover occurs entirely within the local cluster.