Lakeview Adds Quick Start Service to Disaster Recovery for SMBs

Any company doing tape backup lives with the ramifications of taking its system down for as long as it takes to perform the backup. Reducing downtime is a big reason alternative backup methods are being considered, and lost data between tape backups, should an unplanned downtime occur, adds unwanted drama to IT staffers lives. Products such as Lakeview Technology‘s MIMIX dr1 provide an alternative, and Lakeview has extended its services to reach more customers in the small the medium size business (SMB) market.

MIMIX dr1 is promoted, primarily to SMB companies, as a disaster recovery solution. And, indeed, it is. However, most companies use it to replace the traditional tape backup and to minimize planned downtime. MIMIX dr1 uses multiple data recovery points during a 24-hour interval and backs up that data to disk. This is a substantial improvement to the typical once-a-day backup to tape that is used in an estimated 90 percent of iSeries shops. In the case of unplanned downtime, the most recent backup has occurred more recently. This may sound like high availability to some folks, but dr1 is not designed for real-time (or near real-time) backup, a requirement that most SMB shops find unnecessary.

Compared to the larger enterprise operations, the typical SMB organization has a small staff and less expertise in the myriad capabilities of the iSeries. But additional pressures on tape backup have resulted in it becoming a more difficult management challenge as mountains of data grow taller each year. In the SMB area particularly, new technology needs to be simple and the transition needs to be as close to painless as possible. This is why Lakeview has introduced its Quick Start program for dr1.

Bill Hammond, product strategy director at Lakeview Technology, describes Quick Start as a higher level of customer service that goes beyond getting dr1 up and running. This type of conversation is often assumed to be doubletalk for a service agreement or consulting that adds to the expense of the project. Not so in this case, says Hammond. “Quick Start is included in the price of dr1,” he says. “This is not an opportunity for additional incremental revenue and it doesn’t take the project away from the customer’s IT department. It’s a matter of helping the customer get files copied to the right place, determining what needs to be replicated, and not replicating more than necessary. It’s getting some extra learning, some extra work off the plates of the customer’s IT staff.”

Like any data replication, disaster recovery, and even high availability solutions, there are settings that tell the software what to pay attention to and replicate when changes occur. It’s also necessary to set some parameters regarding when the recovery points occur.

MIMIX dr1 monitors a source system looking for changed files and objects. Changes–not the entire object–are replicated and transported from the source iSeries to a backup iSeries. Hammond calls it a compare-repair process. On the target box the changes are placed in a cache.

“To get to a recovery point, where the two systems are in sync, the integrity of the transactional data on the target system is the same as everything on source,” Hammond says. “The system declares a recovery point and it flushes the cache on the target and updates the recovery point and immediately starts to capture the change data again. Then it begins to look for the next recovery point.”

Most customers get between four and 10 recovery points each day, according to Hammond. “This doesn’t compare to a high availability solution, but compared to once-a-day tape backups, this provides more frequent, more current data than tape,” he says. “And on the back end, if a disaster occurs, the data is on disk.”

The amount of recovery points is dependent on the transaction volume and the load on the system. Recovery points come when there is a lull in the transaction volume. Because MIMIX dr1 finds recovery points based on transaction volume, some customers are going to have constant transaction volume levels that will not allow it work. A fairly high level of transaction volumes throughout the day will not be a good environment for dr1. It needs spikes and lulls to work adequately (even if recovery points are hours apart), but in many circumstances this is the way the business operates.

Lakeview offers a dr1 simulator (an evaluation version) that identifies the replication that would have taken place if the product truly had been installed. It includes the amount of data, identifies the recovery points based on transaction volumes, and also provides a measure of bandwidth requirements.

Assisting the IT department through this process is the purpose of Quick Start. The help-oriented program consists of two components. There is live (real human) phone support to ensure the initial experience goes well. Hammond says this is proactive rather than reactive to customer bewilderment and identifies aspects of disaster recovery and product capabilities that the IT staff may not have considered. (After several weeks, the customer goes with standard Lakeview support.) The second component is digital-media, computer-based training. Hammond says this is primarily for future staff additions, changes in dr1 settings that the IT department wants to make later, or for staff that need to refresh knowledge that was covered during the initial product deployment. “We do not have customers go through a training class in order to run the product,” Hammond says.

Pricing for MIMIX dr1 software (which requires V5R1 or higher) begins at $3,500 for a low-end iSeries box. The average price, Hammond says, is near $10,000.

The cost of the second box is the single biggest issue in the purchase of dr1, Hammond says. However, the cost of downtime when the existing tape backup system is running and the opportunity to use load balancing when single boxes are stretched to their limits are two reasons that factor heavily into the decision-making process.