Peer-2-Peer? Remote Vaulting? What is your answer to business continuance requirements in your virtual environment? VTS’s present new issues in relation to contingency planning; now that you have made this large investment in virtual technology, how do you make the most of it? How do you meet continuance requirements while making the most of your VTS?
Several methodologies are commonly accepted and used across the IT world. The ideal option, if money were no object, would be a Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex environment with Peer-2-Peer Virtual Tape Servers. This provides complete fail over and 100% availability. The only issue here is, currently, there may only be 1 or 2% of the data centers in the world that can justify such a solution financially. Many more sites have had the luxury of using Peer-2-Peer environments contained in a single site for availability purposes; this type of implementation results in pretty much 100% data availability should a single hardware component fail, but does nothing in the event of a physical site disaster. Basically, if you have the budget, GDPS w/P2P is certainly the Ferrari of tape processing.
Next on the list, running a distant second in availability is remote vaulting. There are several solutions out there, as simple as channel extending a library to a site across your campus. These can be relatively expensive; especially considering the remote library simply becomes an offsite storage depot since it is not attached to a GDPS. This makes recovery scenarios identical to what you have been doing for the past couple years. The place for this type of solution is for large data centers that have multiple facilities in a reasonably small geographical area and have the capacity to run each other workloads if necessary.
Keep doing what you have beenÂ…option 3: Change nothing. Why not, it has worked well for years. True, and it would continue to work for years to come. However, by not making the best use of the technology at your disposal, investments made in such technologies become less financially viable. This solution also requires that you maintain relatively expensive portable mediums such as 3480/90e. The storage costs associated with a 3480/90e and a 3590 are identical, so the cost per megabyte of working with legacy media is much higher than that that can be achieved with some of today’s technologies, mainly 3590e and 9840b. The frequent mounts, dismounts, and latent throughput numbers are also difficult to justify amongst increasing application uptime demand. Newer technologies shrink batch processing times and backup times when used to their peak efficiency. If you would like to discuss any of these options in detail or even just offer some feedback, we would love to have your thoughts posted in our DR Forum.
As an IBM business partner we have all of these tools and solutions available. In addition to Peer-2-Peer and Remote Vaulting offerings, we can custom design solutions to meet your needs. If you are interested some of the exciting solutions we can bring, please take a look at: http://www.emaglink.com/prodVDR.htm where you can read about MediaMerge/VDR, the software is the driving force behind many of our DR solutions.
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