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.
As a business grows, uptime becomes increasingly important. The maintenance window for your systems can shrink dramatically. Scheduled downtime includes things such as tape backups, application upgrades, and operating system upgrades among other things. How many hours per week can the application be unavailable, and not impact your business? Planned outages are typically the most common event that a high availability solution is used for.
IBM i single system availability
focuses on hardware and software concurrent maintenance and hardware
redundancy, but there is a limit to what can be done on a single system
level. Using IBM i high
availability technologies, such as clusters and independent disk pools,
you can switch production to a second system or have a second set
of data available. These IBM i high
availability solutions allow your business to continue while system
maintenance is being performed. The impact of planned outages can
be minimized using these high availability solutions.
- Offline Saves to Tape
- Saves to tape can be performed from a backup system that has a second copy of the user's data.
- Application and Operating System fixes or upgrades
- A rolling upgrade can be performed to allow fixes or upgrades to be installed. Fixes can be applied to the backup system while the primary system is running production. The workload can then be switched to the backup system and fixes can be applied to the original primary. After the upgrade has finished, production can be switched back to the original primary.
- Hardware Maintenance
- Changes that cannot be handled by concurrent hardware maintenance typically require downtime of the system. Having a high availability solution will allow production to be switched to a backup system and the hardware maintenance performed without impacting the business.