IBM delivers an industry-first service to improve business continuity and lower disaster recovery costs on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

Data replication is key to business resiliency because data drives decision-making. Data informs and feeds into mission-critical processes, analytics, systems and, ultimately, business insights. Organizations must guarantee that it is constantly available and accessible to users in near real-time. As enterprises develop across geographies and platforms, replication enables them to scale in tandem with their expanding data requirements while maintaining performance.

To better fulfill the demands of our clients, we are pleased to announce the availability of Global Replication on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is the first to offer Global Replication Service, which provides asynchronous data replication between two sites over long distances. Asynchronous replication updates the backup instance at regular intervals, rather than continuously. This requires less bandwidth and connectivity, is less costly and uses less resources.

Benefits of Global Replication

Global Replication is a valuable feature for high availability and disaster recovery because it keeps your data offsite and away from the premises. If the primary instance is destroyed by a catastrophic incident — such as a fire, storm, flood or other natural disaster — your secondary data instance will be secure off-premises, allowing you to retrieve data. Data replication off-premises is far less expensive than duplicating and keeping data in your data center.

The benefits of Global Replication on Power Virtual Server include the following:

• Maintain a consistent and recoverable copy of the data at the remote site, created with minimal impact to applications at your local site.
• Efficiently synchronize the local and remote sites with support for failover and failback modes, helping to reduce the time that is required to switch back to the local site after a planned or unplanned outage.
• Replicate more data in less time to remote locations.
• Maintain redundant data centers in distant geographies for rapid recovery from disasters.
• Eliminate costly dedicated networks for replication and avoid bandwidth upgrades.

Features

Global Replication Service on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server offers several appealing features. Storwize Global Mirror Change Volume Replication is used to improve recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and service and response times. RPO refers to a company’s loss tolerance — the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs. RTO refers to how much time an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business. RPO and RTO improvements result in less data loss and less time to recover respectively. Both are crucial elements of a disaster recovery strategy:

Global Replication Service uses consistency groups to protect data volumes. Consistency Groups make sure that every write to the production site is likewise consistently and correctly written to the copy, allowing the copy to always be used in place of the production site. It enables a variety of third party-based disaster recovery options to be offered. The data centers for IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers will be set up to offer the connection needed for replication efforts. The Power Virtual Server’s Global Replication Service strategy is consistent with how the majority of Power clients now handle disaster recovery on-premises:

Technology Services Offerings for IBM i Copy Services, including Global Replication Service (GRS)

PowerHA Tools for IBM i from IBM Technology Services enables clients to fully automate disaster recovery and backup solutions and manage the environment with their existing IBM i skills.

These capabilities have now been extended to Power Virtual Server with the availability of GRS.  The benefits include the following:

• Increase application availability by reducing or eliminating your backup window.
• Simplify and automate operations of your multi-site disaster recovery solution in Power Virtual Server.

Technology Services Offerings for IBM AIX Copy Services, including Global Replication Service (GRS)

IBM Toolkit for AIX from Technology Services enables clients to automate disaster recovery (DR) functions and capabilities by integrating Power Virtual Server with the capabilities of GRS.

With the Toolkit, clients can manage their DR environment using their existing AIX skills. The benefits include the following:

• Simplify and automate operations of your multi-site disaster recovery solution in Power Virtual Server.
• Provide a secondary IBM Cloud site as a host for your business application as a disaster recovery solution.

Start reaping the benefits

The introduction of Global Replication Service reflects our commitment to enabling business continuity planning, data center efficiency, operational excellence and cost optimization with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. Business continuity planning keeps your business running with reliable failover solutions, including backup, high availability and disaster recovery. Data center optimization accelerates time to value, business expansion and worldwide growth by optimizing your data center. Operational excellence and cost optimization reduce operational costs, improve service and response times and ensure off-hours coverage.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server with Global Replication Service is now available in several datacenters.

To learn more and get started with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server with Global Replication Service, please contact an IBM Power Expert or contact the IBM Technology Services team.