System iNetwork

December 7, 2009

Power Resilience Survey Reveals Tighter Timelines, Needed Tech

Vision Solutions is getting ready to release its second annual State of Resilience report, which is a detailed overview of disaster recovery expectations, technologies, and the overall state of resilience among IBM Power Systems users. The report is based on a year-long study including survey data from more than 3,500 technical professionals and executives involved with the management of IBM i (i5/OS) and AIX environments on IBM Power Systems.

Vision sent me an advance copy, and while I obviously can't share all of it, it does prove to be interesting reading.

"This report clearly demonstrates the urgency for companies of all sizes to ensure they have an effective data protection and business continuity plan in place," notes Edward Vesely, Vision Solutions' senior vice president of marketing. "Such strategy undoubtedly involves the right combination of high availability, systems management and disaster recovery solutions; however, many firms still lack the appropriate technologies to meet their overall objectives."

According to Vesely, the report explains how a range of business resiliency and optimization technologies benefit businesses of all sizes -- and this year, by the way, Vision expanded its data collection to include company size. While the results showed that, not surprisingly, larger organizations favored faster recovery time objectives in the event of a disaster or failure, the business requirements between large and small organizations wasn't nearly as wide as you might expect.

Overall, the survey reports a trend toward more aggressive recovery time and recovery point objectives across the Power Systems platform, including both IBM i and AIX. And yet, despite the more challenging objectives, Vision found that many firms don't have the appropriate technology in place to meet their own recovery objectives.

In addition, more companies are investing in disaster recovery capabilities over high availability these days, and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) "data rewind" capabilities are gaining support across companies of all sizes.

The Vision Webcast

Vision Solutions and IBM are hosting a free "State of IBM Power Systems Technology and Resilience" webcast tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. The event will feature Mark Shearer, IBM Systems & Technology Group vice president of marketing, communications and sales support, along with Vision's Vesely. They plan to share results of the report and recent Power Systems technology and market developments, including IBM's New Power Equation, Dynamic Infrastructure, and Smarter Planet initiatives.

Registered participants can get an advance copy of the report, though Vision will likely also make the report available for download after tomorrow's event. For more, see http://www.visionsolutions.com/stateofresilience.

Posted by cmaxcer at December 7, 2009 10:18 AM