IBM Adds Disaster Recovery, Archiving to SmartClouds

Published: June 27, 2011

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The independent software vendors making backup, recovery, and high availability software and their service providers who are moving out onto the Internet to offer remote disaster recovery and arching services to SMB data centers just got some pretty tough competition: IBM.

IBM launched its SmartCloud public infrastructure cloud back in April, based on X64 servers and VMware's ESX Server hypervisor. IBM's earlier test and development SmartCloud was based on Red Hat's KVM hypervisor, and Red Hat sources tell me that the SmartCloud public cloud will also support KVM at some point. The fact that IBM's SmartCloud public cloud doesn't yet have Power-based systems means that there are not replication and failover services available for IBM i workloads, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them. (They'll get here eventually.) And that means two things. IBM i archiving and resilience providers are going to get a breather for the core RPG and COBOL applications and DB2 databases. But those portions of the workloads at IBM i shops that use the ASCII side of the Integrated File System or that run on Windows or Linux machines proper can be replicated to IBM's SmartCloud.

Last week, IBM announced what it calls the SmartCloud Resilience services, of which there are two.

The first is the SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery Service, which lets customers using virtualized X64 servers replicate their VMs out to the SmartCloud and, using the SmartCloud portal, fire them up on IBM's iron in the event their machines crash. IBM is replicating the data and applications from the production systems on a continual basis, so the recovery time window is presumably small. You can, of course, replicate physical servers on remote virtual instances--it just means doing a physical-to-virtual (P2V in the lingo) snapshot every now and then replicating that. But the whole point of going virtual is that you no longer need to worry that remote machines have the same hardware configuration as production machines.

The other service is called SmartCloud Archive, which is not for archiving machine images and their applications and systems software, but boring stuff like document management and e-discovery once you have piled all your structured and unstructured data onto IBM's SmartCloud. IBM says this is not just any-old archive, but one that meets "stringent privacy and regulatory compliance."

IBM will be rolling out these two new SmartCloud services on July 19. Pricing was not divulged.

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