• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Disaster Recovery, At Your Service

    November 16, 2020 Matt Paterini

    Every organization needs a sound disaster recovery plan to protect their business from natural disasters, weather events, cyber-attacks, and other unexpected threats. Disaster recovery strategies can take on different forms depending on the requirements of the business, specifically the defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

    These RTO and RPO metrics are not precisely the same, but they are interrelated and are part of a complete disaster recovery plan.

    The RTO metric is not just a stopwatch that starts ticking between the time applications go down, for whatever reason, and when they come back again online again. Rather, it should be a more complex metric that assesses the level of importance of the application suite and what effect they have on the running of the business. Some applications can be down for hours or days and not have a huge impact on the running of the business, others can be down for hours and days and this causes havoc or a complete stoppage of operations. The point is, there is not just one RTO, but many at most companies, since most companies have dozens to hundreds to thousands of applications, and not all RTOs need to be created equal.

    While RTO is about time, RPO is about data. And to be specific, it is about how much data that the company would normally be capturing during the course of business that it can afford to lose before it has an adverse and big impact on the business. Losing data is something that is always disruptive, but this is more of a measure of relative disruption because all data loss is not equal. And therefore, just like all applications by their nature have their own RTO, they also have their own RPO. And they may not correspond one-to-one, either, although there tends to be a correlation between the two.

    Not every company wants to manage the disaster recovery setup, and in fact, we would argue that while disaster recovery is key to the success of the business, mastering all of the ins and outs of disaster recovery is not something every company should – or can – do. If we let service providers like Microsoft and Google, who have precise skills shared across many customers that gives them deep expertise, manage our emails, why not let similar experts with skills and expertise culled from supporting many customers manage our disaster recovery?

    That, in short, is what Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is all about: Providing remote data and system recovery as a managed service. Unlike manual disaster recovery (DR) approaches in which organizations simply have access to a remote system and are required to manually restore data in the event of a disaster, DRaaS contractually ensures remote recovery to defined RTO/RPO, completely managed by the MSP. This makes DRaaS more reliable than a manual DR plan, as many organizations do not have the internal resources suitable to adequately manage DR.

    High availability, often shortened to HA although there is not usually much funny about it, is also a common DR practice that often gets confused with DRaaS. For many organizations, the ability to role-swap to a second system with immediate RTO/RPO is not necessary. HA also requires maintaining a second system and does not address archival backups for days, weeks, months and years. Unless immediate RTO/RPO is truly required, HA is typically not a cost-effective DR option. In fact, a cloud backup and DRaaS strategy is approximately one half to one third the investment of HA.

    A cloud backup and DRaaS strategy is appropriate for an organization that has shorter RTO/RPO requirements than a manual approach can accommodate, but the immediate RTO/RPO provided by HA is not required.

    As it relates specifically to IBM i DRaaS, UCG Technologies and VAULT400 offer a 12-hour and a 24-hour RTO with 24-hour RPO in each case.

    Both IBM i DRaaS offerings begin with VAULT400 cloud backups to two remote, regulatory compliant data centers. For the 24-hour RTO option, UCG Technologies loads the proper IBM i operating system and PTF level at the point of disaster declaration, ports data from the remote vault to a multi-platform POD of shared systems and provides remote VPN access in under 24 hours.

    For the 12-hour RTO option, UCG pre-loads the IBM i operating system and PTFs to a dedicated serial number assigned system. At the point of disaster declaration, data ports from the remote vault to the dedicated system and remote VPN access is provided in under 12 hours.

    Regardless of your organization’s RTO/RPO requirements, a formal DR plan is critical to minimizing risk. For the vast majority of organizations, a cloud backup with DRaaS strategy proves to be the most reliable and cost-effective for the business.

    This content is sponsored by UCG Technologies.

    Matt Paterini is regional director at UCG Technologies. He brings his energy and strong work ethic to his responsibilities for sales, marketing, social media, and managerial duties.

    RELATED STORIES

    Taking The Pulse Of The IBM i Market

    If You Can’t Get To The Tape, It Doesn’t Matter If It Is Dead Or Not

    Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

    UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management

    UCG Technologies Takes Off To The Great White North

    UCG And HelpSystems Make Acquisitions

    Spreading A Wider IT Net At UCG Technologies

    Keeping Ransomware Out of the VAULT

    UCG And Expedient Partner For Expanded IBM i Hosted Services

    Vaulting Service Replaces Mirroring For IBM i Shop

    IBM i Shops Climb Into the VAULT

    IBM i Shops Turn to Vault400 for Protection

    UCG Grows BaaS Biz with VAULT400

    Mountains Of Data Bring Recovery Issues

    UCG Champions Technology Upgrade

    Two More Customer Wins for Vault400

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags: Tags: DR, DRAAS, IBM i, recovery point objective, recovery time objective, RPO, RTO, UCG Technologies, VAULT400

    Sponsored by
    Midrange Dynamics North America

    Git up to speed with MDChange!

    Git can be lightning-fast when dealing with just a few hundred items in a repository. But when dealing with tens of thousands of items, transaction wait times can take minutes.

    MDChange offers an elegant solution that enables you to work efficiently any size Git repository while making your Git experience seamless and highly responsive.

    Learn more.

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 10 – Debugger Enhancements Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 73

This Issue Sponsored By

  • Fresche Solutions
  • UCG Technologies
  • Datanational Corporation
  • New Generation Software
  • WorksRight Software

Table of Contents

  • Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support
  • Disaster Recovery, At Your Service
  • Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 10 – Debugger Enhancements
  • A Little Less Talk, A Little More Action, Please
  • IBM Keeps OpenShift Up To Speed On Power Systems

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon
  • COMMON Youth Movement Continues at POWERUp 2025
  • IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11
  • Eradani Uses AI For New EDI And API Service
  • Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D
  • FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?
  • Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts
  • Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
  • Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 20

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle