Benefits of high availability

High availability protects companies from lost revenue when access to their data resources and critical business applications is disrupted.

The starting point for the selection of a high availability solution is to fully identify the set of availability problems that you are attempting to address. For business continuity, these problems can be collected into five major categories.

Planned outages
IBM® i high availability can reduce the impact to your customers and users whenever you need to take systems or data offline to perform necessary maintenance tasks, such as nightly backups or the installation of new hardware or software.
Unplanned outages
IBM i high availability solutions can provide protection from unplanned outages caused by human error, software problems, hardware failures, and environmental issues.
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery addresses the set of resources, plans, services and procedures to recover and resume mission critical applications at a remote site in the event of a disaster.
Backup window reduction
IBM i high availability solutions can reduce the time your system or services are unavailable during your backups. The time it takes to complete a backup from start to finish is called a backup window. The challenge is to back up everything in the window of time that you have.
Load balancing
IBM i high availability solutions can be used for load balancing. The most common technologies for workload balancing involve moving work to available resources. Contrast this with common performance management techniques that involve moving resources to work that does not achieve performance goals.

Parent topic: High availability overview