Achieving Rapid Data Recovery for IBM AIX® Environments

How to Achieve Rapid Data Recovery for IBM AIX^® Environments

Businesses of all sizes must plan for recovery. IT personnel generally face several challenges when implementing an operational plan that protects both data recovery and applications:

• How can I ensure my applications and data are recoverable, without impacting business operations?
• Are there any data protection approaches that meet my recovery point and recovery time objectives or must I lessen my objectives?
• Can I afford to implement a comprehensive plan that covers both my local and remote (disaster) recovery requirements?
• Are there cost-effective alternatives that meet my requirements?

Operational requirements are not the only mandates that may drive the design of your recovery plan. Various industry-specific regulations, including, among others, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and HITECH, specify requirements for data retention and recoverability. To meet these requirements, businesses have to
deal with a variety of data vulnerabilities: inadvertently deleted files or records (operator error), viruses or hackers that cause data corruption or deletion, and natural disasters that put much more than just your data at risk. Distributed or branch offices may also have ease-of-use needs that may not be an issue in larger, more centralized businesses.

If your business is typical, you use some form of data protection today— probably tape-based backup. Periodically, someone shuts applications down to perform a backup to tape.  Depending on the volume of data that is being copied, this may take several hours and require manual intervention to set up
the backup job, run it, confirm that it ran, and then return the
application to operation.

The backup copy may be kept locally in case data needs to be recovered in the near term. Eventually, possibly after several weeks, backup tapes may be moved to an offsite location for archival purposes. The reason to make and keep copies of your data is so that, should an event—catastrophic or otherwise—
delete or corrupt data, you have a clean copy safely tucked away to use for recovery purposes.

So, the question is, do you have a plan that meets your recovery requirements to your satisfaction across these areas?  Download this whitepaper to learn more.