Rapid Data Recovery on a Budget

Published: May 17, 2011

by Dan Burger

High availability and disaster recovery solution provider iSam Blue is determined to make a name for itself by driving down the cost of HA-DR for IBM i shops. As companies depend on the Internet for their livelihood, business continuity becomes a growing issue and downtime becomes increasingly costly. For a fee starting at $50 a day iSam will provide a recovery point within minutes and a recovery time of four hours or less.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's because iSam Blue president and CEO Robert Seal was working at iTera five years ago when that company made a similar $50-a-day offer as it was carving a niche in the IBM iSeries market. The success of that company led to it being acquired by Vision Solutions, which also purchased another IBM i HA-DR software company called Lakeview Technology to become the most dominant vendor in this market.

Executives with the notion that HA and DR is expensive may be surprised and interested in this offer.

It goes by the name BlueCloud HA/DR, and Seal describes it as a "complete solution" of hardware, software, hosting, and monitoring for IBM i systems, which continuously replicates the corporate system and data to a remote server where it can continue to operate in case of a disaster. iSam Blue is the North American distributor for Trader's HA-DR software for IBM i, called Quick-EDD.

"While more companies are adding business continuity protection as IBM has reduced the cost of hardware and operating systems, the percentage is still low," Seal says in a press release. "Too many customers are still exposed to system outages and natural disasters.

"Worse, many really do not understand how exposed they are," Seal warned. "Years ago, losing up to 24 hours of data was a problem, but it was recoverable from backup documents. Nowadays, companies have gained efficiencies by reducing or eliminating paper, but haven't adjusted their disaster plans. They still have a recovery point objective (RPO) of up to 24 hours, but no way to reproduce the lost transactions since there is no paper trail."

iSam Blue offers more than one pathway to achieving business continuity protection. Organizations can purchase software licenses to Quick-EDD outright, which is the traditional method, or license the software and maintenance on a monthly basis. A managed services option is also available in which iSam Blue or its business partner installs, monitors and maintains the equipment on the customer's premises or in a hosted environment, which is generally referred to as a cloud computing alternative.

A $50 per day investment in BlueCloud HA/DR gets customers access to a P05 machine with 250 GB of DASD. Additional fees are charged for setup, a switch, and other items, the company says.

In addition to gaining the attention of companies without business continuity protection, which Seal conservatively estimates at 75 percent of the installed base, iSam Blue is also in the process of building its business partner channel of IBM i software vendors, resellers, and consultants.

Seal describes iSam Blue's business partner program as designed to minimize the business partner's investment and risk by beginning with referrals and building to include full service and support. Upfront services associated with customer requirements are shared based on the partner's level of involvement in the installation and customer training.

Additional information on iSam Blue can be found on the company's website, www.isamblue.com.

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