Infrastructure Availability: For Reliable Business Continuity

“IBM solutions can meet any degree of infrastructure availability requirements through the development and support of flexible, tightly integrated hardware and software solutions backed by world-class services.”

Creating a Dynamic, Resilient IT Infrastructure
Escalating IT costs. Underutilized servers. Energy-consuming data centers. Stretched IT resources. Service-level agreement demands. Your IT infrastructure should be there to help you meet your business objectives, but managing increasingly complex IT infrastructures-and getting the best bang for your IT buck-is a primary challenge IT organizations face today. So companies are looking for ways to do more with their IT environments, and sometimes, even do more with less. They're looking for ways to optimize IT.

By creating a highly efficient and dynamic IT infrastructure, you can attain maximum business value from your IT investment. You can create a more responsive IT environment if you effectively manage and fully utilize your IT assets. By optimizing your IT environment, you can better anticipate and manage change, reduce architectural complexity, and increase the value of revenue-generating services.

Done right, IT optimization can reduce costs and complexity through strategies like energy efficiency, consolidation, and virtualization, while improving IT service delivery to enable a more resilient IT environment. And for reliable IT service delivery, you’ll need operational management efficiency and the predictable availability of your IT infrastructure. By combining the right solutions for operational management and infrastructure availability, you can increase your operational efficiency while improving your responsiveness to planned and unplanned events that might interrupt critical business operations.

IT Disruptions: A Fact of Life
IT infrastructure and services should be very accessible and highly available. But complex systems inherently have many potential failure points and can be difficult to implement correctly. Hardware components can fail, power outages and other environmental factors can wreak havoc on business processes, network connections can be severed, and applications and operating systems can go awry. And when unplanned downtime occurs, business operations can be compromised. Then there's planned downtime—like software patches and system configuration changes—that can only take effect by rebooting the system.

As business operations become increasingly vulnerable to the impact of IT disruptions, traditional backup and recovery strategies become increasingly inefficient. Yet infrastructure availability is sorely needed, given the increasing dependence on IT applications, services, and data for business critical operations and processes. More applications are becoming business critical, data availability is essential to supporting continuous operations, and aggressive service-level agreements are straining IT organizations to deliver on them. So today, many companies face a business availability challenge—simultaneously trying to deal with increased IT complexity, greater demands on IT teams, and a growing need for infrastructure availability. Can organizations maintain a high level of infrastructure availability—automating operations to run more efficiently and delivering reliable IT services for the business—without seriously draining resources and budgets?

Infrastructure Availability-More than Just Backing Up Your Data
With the right combination of hardware, software, and services, you can enable and enhance your IT infrastructure for greater availability. You'll want resilient systems and infrastructure architecture, with key elements such as geographically dispersed clustering, scalability for growth, virtualized systems, and virtualized storage. Virtualization-pioneered by IBM on the mainframe 40 years ago-can greatly enhance infrastructure availability by enabling application and data portability within a virtualized environment. Virtualization pools diverse physical resources into a single logical entity. By isolating applications and data from physical systems, you lower the barrier for high availability and disaster recovery. Automated recovery and failover capability can reduce downtime. Plus, simplified virtual resource management enables workload balancing. And importantly, virtualization can drastically reduce power consumption and associated costs.

Operations management software can enable and manage your IT infrastructure for increased availability, and can support functions including data replication, systems, storage, and network management, workload and capacity management, and automation for improved recovery time. Additionally, skilled resources can assess complex heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments, identify the most efficient methods for delivering on your service-level agreements, and deploy and sustain your integrated solution.

With the right solution for your business, your IT organization can provide IT services on a constant and consistent basis. With a suitable solution, you can enable high availability, with a fault-tolerant, failure-resistant infrastructure supporting continuous application processing. You can count on continuous operations through non-disruptive backups and system maintenance. And, you can depend on a reliable, predictable disaster recovery strategy with protection against unplanned outages.

Assessing Your Infrastructure Availability Requirements
So, if you're ready to improve your service levels to meet your growing business demands, you'll first need to define the level of availability you need from your IT infrastructure and from its inherent applications. By answering some key questions, you should be able to start zeroing in on the right solutions. Which applications and data are critical to sustaining business operations? How long can your business afford to be down in the event of an outage? When recovering from an outage, how much data can you afford to recreate? Can your business continue to operate if you lose an entire site? Does your business require automated recovery processes that provide aggressive recovery times? Additionally, how much slower or faster will disaster recovery happen if you spend a little more or a little less? Once you understand your infrastructure availability requirements, IBM can help you define which combination of hardware, software, and services best meets your needs.

IBM Infrastructure Availability Solutions: Responsive, Reliable, Flexible
With IBM, you can optimize your IT infrastructure for high availability, continuous operations, and disaster recovery. For over 25 years, IBM has been a leader in IT service delivery solutions, providing innovative service management, virtualization, and other IT optimization solutions across the IT environment—with key expertise in managing and integrating with multi-vendor systems. IBM solutions can meet any degree of infrastructure availability requirements through the development and support of flexible, tightly integrated hardware and software solutions backed by world-class services.

The IBM Systems Director family of tools, which includes IBM Systems Director Extensions and IBM Systems Director Foundation, simplifies platform management across server and storage infrastructures, and helps IT professionals better coordinate and manage all of their virtual and physical resources in the data center. The Systems Director family provides a modular, open standards-based set of solutions that can be easily tailored to fit the requirements of any size business and can be integrated seamlessly into any enterprise management solutions. IBM Tivoli Workload Automation can help improve operational efficiencies and resilience to unplanned surges in workload volume and unplanned IT outages without stressing resources. Also, IBM services can help you optimize your IT by assessing multi-vendor IT environments and identifying the most effective solution for your unique business requirements. IBM can also help with your implementations and provide ongoing, managed technical support.

IBM helped the Beiersdorf AG cosmetics group, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, and supported by 17,000 employees, when faced with diminishing performance and availability for its SAP software environment as existing database servers ran out of capacity. Beiersdorf Shared Services (BSS) turned to IBM to provide an infrastructure that would considerably reduce business risk, ongoing storage requirements, and total cost of ownership. The company implemented two IBM System z9 Enterprise Class servers and System Storage DS8100 storage servers at separate data centers, running IBM DB2 databases to support the SAP software environment, plus Capacity Backup and IBM Metro Mirror to ensure high availability in the event that one data center fails. According to Dr. Winfried Sturm, BSS Network and Technical Systems Manager, "We cannot afford downtime in our SAP software environment, so the excellent reliability of the System z9 platform is very important to us. We haven't had a single failure in over two years…but the real advantage of the new infrastructure is that we have a robust disaster recovery solution."

Keeping Your Business Running
IBM can help keep your business up and running by providing a consistent, repeatable way to execute the tasks that drive infrastructure availability. IBM has everything you need—from system solutions for high availability, to systems management and automation solutions that can help you enable and enhance your infrastructure, to services tailored to your unique requirements—so you can rely on your dynamic IT environment for continuous business operations.