MSPs Expand IBM i DR and HA Practices

November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

If there’s a silver lining to the giant cloud that was Superstorm Sandy, it’s that it has shined a light on the need for companies to establish and practice disaster recovery (DR) plans. IBM i shops are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) to assist with their DR and high availability (HA) planning. In recent weeks, three MSPs, including Corus360, Recovery Point, and DataStorage Corp., announced upgrades to their DR and HA practices.

Corus360 is a large Atlanta, Georgia-based value added reseller (VAR) with a subsidiary called RES-Q that provides a range of DR and business continuity (BC) services, including: hot site, warm site, and drop-ship services; data vaulting, data replication, and HA management; and workgroup services (including temporary office space, call center facilities, and temporary and permanent staffing).

RES-Q, which operates a 30,000-square-foot data center in Norcross, Georgia, last week announced an expansion of its DR services to include “traditional recovery options for IBM mainframe, IBM Power Series, iSeries, and various backup and recovery options for Intel-based systems.” The company also announced an expansion into Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, which will be the area covered by new senior account manager Zak Balado.

Recovery Point is also landing on the national IBM i map after signing a partnership deal with mega VAR and MSP Sirius Computer Solutions. Sirius already provides MSP services for the range of midrange and mainframe servers from IBM. As part of the deal with Recovery Point, Sirius’ MSP services will be hosted within Recovery Point’s data centers in Maryland, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

“It’s a good marriage and a logical one in our industry,” says Recovery Point president Marc Langer in a press release. “Sirius can leverage our … managed hosting and disaster recovery facilities, along with our private fiber carrier neutral network, to offer robust yet cost-effective HA and DR solutions to their clients. And Recovery Point gains access to Sirius’ broad range of expertise in the design and management of solutions utilizing technologies such HACMP, MIMIX, and Echo2.”

Meanwhile, Data Storage Corp, which you will remember bought the IBM i data vaulting and hosted DR and HA business of SafeData, announced it has taken delivery on new IBM i servers in its SAS70 Type II data center in Westbury, New York. This data center provides a backup for Data Storage’s primary data center in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Data storage executive VP Matthew Grosso says the expansion bolsters the company’s ability to deliver business continuity and data protection services to IBM i customers. “Over the past year, we have seen tremendous interest in our HA services and thanks to IBM’s highly scalable and reliable architecture, we have been able to greatly expand the scope of our cloud services platform,” he says.