High availability overview
Business continuity is the capability of a business to withstand outages and to operate important services normally and without interruption in accordance with predefined service-level agreements. To achieve a given level of business continuity that you want, a collection of services, software, hardware, and procedures must be selected, described in a documented plan, implemented, and practiced regularly. The business continuity solution must address the data, the operational environment, the applications, the application hosting environment, and the end-user interface. All must be available to deliver a good, complete business continuity solution.
Business continuity includes disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA), and can be defined as the ability to withstand all outages (planned, unplanned, and disasters) and to provide continuous processing for all important applications. The ultimate goal is for the outage time to be less than .001% of total service time. A high availability environment typically includes more demanding recovery time objectives (seconds to minutes) and more demanding recovery point objectives (zero user disruption) than a disaster recovery scenario.
High availability solutions provide fully automated failover to a backup system so that users and applications can continue working without disruption. HA solutions must have the ability to provide an immediate recovery point. At the same time, they must provide a recovery time capability that is significantly better than the recovery time that you experience in a non-HA solution topology.
What's new for IBM i 7.1
Read about new information for the High Availability overview topic collection.- PDF file for High availability overview
You can view and print a PDF file of this information. - Benefits of high availability
High availability protects companies from lost revenue when access to their data resources and critical business applications is disrupted. - Components of high availability
High availability provides access to critical business applications and data in the event of a disruption in service.IBM® i high
availability solutions minimize and sometimes eliminate the effect
of planned and unplanned outages and site-wide disasters for your
business. The basis for IBM i high
availability solutions is cluster technology. - High availability criteria
IBM i high availability offers a choice of different technologies for data resiliency and application availability. Each of the different technologies has different characteristics. These characteristics should be matched with the unique requirements of each individual business application. The following parameters should be understood and considered when choosing which data resiliency technique is best for your business. - Choosing a IBM i high availability solution
After you have determined your business goals and requirements, you need to choose the right IBM i high availability solution that fits your business. - Related information for High availability overview
Product manuals, IBM Redbooks® publications, Web sites, and other information center topic collections contain information that relates to the Implementing high availability topic collection. You also can find related information about implementing independent disk pools, cross-site mirroring, and disaster recovery. You can view or print any of the PDF files.