Today's enterprises can no longer afford planned or unplanned system outages. Even a few minutes of application downtime can cause big financial losses, erode client confidence, damage brand image and present public relations problems. The on demand data center must be resilient enough to handle the ups and downs of a global operation, and it must manage changes and threats with consistent availability and security and privacy, around the world and around the clock.
Continuous availability solutions are integrations of servers, storage, software and automation, and networking. Most of the solutions are based on a form of operating system server clustering to provide application availability. Data replication and failover are automated.When an application failure is detected, a continuous availability solution can perform a predefined set of tasks required to restart the application on another server utilizing the mirrored data residing on the secondary storage systems.
IBM zSeries Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) To attain high levels of continuous availability and near-transparent disaster recovery, the IBM eServer® zSeries® Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ (GDPS®) solution is based on geographical clusters and disk mirroring. GDPS is a family of IBM Global Services offerings for single site or a multi-site application availability solution, designed to provide an integrated, end-to-end solution for enterprise IT business continuity, integrating software automation, servers, storage, and networking.
GDOC continuous availability for open systems Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters (GDOC) is a multivendor solution designed to protect the availability of critical applications that run on UNIX, Windows, or Linux servers. GDOC is based on an Open Systems Cluster architecture spread across two or more sites with data mirrored between sites to provide high availability and Disaster Recovery. In this section, we provide a concise overview of the GDOC function, its benefits, and applications. This solution is delivered by IBM Global Services.
Continuous Availability for MaxDB and SAP liveCache In an SAP SCM environment, SAP liveCache is becoming an increasingly critical component. SAP liveCache is an SAP database that is preloaded into memory for very fast access. SAP has introduced hot-standby functionality with liveCache 7.5, available with SCM 4.1, to provide the fastest possible means of recovery. This solution design for the liveCache hot standby requires specific functionality on behalf of the supporting I/O subsystem (split mirror and concurrent volume access) and is closely integrated with the control software of the subsystem via an API. IBM offers the I/O subsystem solution for IBM TotalStorage on AIX for both the SAN Volume Controller (and all supported I/O subsystems) and native ESS.
