Chances are every piece of data you might ever rely upon to make an important decision has been reduced to a digital format and resides somewhere on your computer or your company network.

One wrong click, one nasty virus, one untimely power surge or unhappy employee and that data is gone forever!

Data downtime and data loss can cost your company uncountable hours in lost productivity and revenue. In addition to the direct loss, business and potential to generate revenue can also be crippled by even the most minimal of data-destroying meltdowns.

Imagine the loss of productivity that would occur if your accounting department suffered the loss of all of their files – 20Mb of accounting data takes 21 days and costs at least $20,000 to reproduce.

Among companies who lose data in a disaster, 50% never re-open and 90% are out of business within two years!

“We backup every night”

That’s a great step, but now imagine this:

It’s the end of the month, and everyone is busy with normal procedure, when your system goes down. Your ICT department is on the case, they have a backup from last night. They need to fix or replace the part that failed, possibly reinstall whatever operating system is on the server, reinstall the in-house systems and finally replace the data from the backup.

This could take anything from hours to in worst case situations, months!

Is this acceptable to your business, and your end of month accounts?

HA Stands for High Availability, and it’s a little like insurance

The idea behind it is that your backup data is always up to date, and it’s quickly replaceable – usually within minutes. Costs vary between solutions, but it’s a must these days for anyone who relies on their data being safe.

Computer Merchants know a lot about HA – it’s a core part of our business because we know how important it is for you to keep your data safe. Call us on 1800 777 111.

See also: High Availability – *noMAX (sentry, defender, garrison), High Availability – Vision Solutions (EchoCluster, EchoStream)

“By 2011, some form of CDP will be deployed in 80% of the Fortune 2000.”
- Gartner

EchoStream^TM for AIX® is a true continuous data protection solution that delivers nearly instantaneous recovery of your applications and data at the push of a button. Unlike traditional backup solutions, it enables you to recover data from any point in time, easily and immediately.

So when your business encounters accidental or malicious data corruption, you can reverse the damage and continue on. Use it to make your data more secure, and as a cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

EchoCluster^TM for AIX® keeps your applications up and running through continuous server monitoring and immediate, automated failover to a local or remotely located alternate server. With innovative features that continuously seek out potential problems at the hardware, software and network levels, it minimises downtime to only seconds or minutes.

So you can save time and money and boost productivity. It’s the easy, affordable way to keep your critical AIX applications and data protected and available.

Contact us

Call us on 1800 777 111 to get continuous data protection up and running for your business.

Instant recovery – any time you need it

In business, time is a precious commodity, and there seems to be less and less available, as we’re tasked to fit more and more into it.

That’s why, when it comes to protecting and recovering your all important data, losing either time or information assets is simply not an option.

What’s needed is the ability to truly step back to any point in time to quickly recover data following any kind of incident, whether a security breach, virus attack, software corruption, or simply accidentally deleted files.

EchoStream/EchoCluster by Vision Solutions

EchoStream/EchoCluster is a true continuous data protection and automated high-availability solution that delivers nearly instantaneous recovery of your applications and data. Independent of applications and database, EchoStream/EchoCluster is designed specifically for the IBM AIX platform running on IBM system p and POWER architecture.

Computer Merchants – service with an edge

Talk to us about EchoStream, EchoCluster and affordable business continuity solutions services. Since 1979, we’ve forged a reputation as the most proactive, customer focused and service driven ICT partner in the country.

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For more information freecall 1800 777 111 or email us.

It is usually an agreement between the business and the IT Department around Service Level Agreements the business requires. This may differ between applications as some businesses have critical applications.

You may also need to consider the fault tolerance of an application before choosing a HA solution. HA is not fault tolerance, as it usually involves some downtime measured in minutes while the HA system takes over the workload from the production system.

Some key questions to ask your business that will help you determine if you need a HA solution are:

• Can the system be down at all?
• What is the business/dollars impact of downtime on the system? (Remember down time can be scheduled or unscheduled).
• If you can’t take the system down for any reason, how do you apply patches, service packs, upgrade databases application upgrades or hardware upgrades?

When you have highly available systems, all these things become a simple matter of failing over to the HA system, doing the maintenance, then failing back to production.

The result of all this is that it isn’t just a technical decision

Management needs to sign off on the decision so the business is ready to pick up the tab for the expense of going down the HA path.

Computer Merchants offers two products (EchoStream and EchoCluster) for AIX systems that, when linked together, provide

• continuous data protection,
• point in time recovery and
• automated failover from production to DR.

It allows for failover of a system or LPAR or application without disturbing other applications or LPARs. This is all managed from one of the easiest to use GUIs, and it is this simplicity that can eliminate the need for special training that is required for competing products.

Call us on 1800 777 111 to discuss if HA is right for you.

It seems that both these types of products have been lacking from the AIX market space

EchoStream, from Vision Solutions,  is a true continuous data protection solution that delivers any point-in-time data recovery at the push of a button. Instantly reverse accidental or malicious data corruption without the time and labour required for recovery from tape.

This is a truly a unique product that is not application or database aware and has a very light footprint on your network. So it is suitable for nearly all applications from intense ERP applications to light peripheral applications. It can make recovery from a small or large disaster very simple as you can recover a single file, an application or complete LPAR’ed servers.

To talk about EchoCluster we first have to define a couple of terms:

• High Performance Clustering
  • A cluster with nodes running software to implement parallelism, often with high performance network infrastructure
• High Availability Clustering
  • A cluster with nodes running software to implement automatic takeover in cases of failure

EchoCluster is an implementation of High Availability clustering on AIX

This product, by using a heartbeat between servers, can manage automated or manual failover of single applications or complete servers in the event of a failure. It also manages the syncronisation of data back to the production server and fail back once the problem has been repaired.

If you would like to know more about this exciting product set, talk with your Computer Merchants rep, or call us on 1800 777 111.

After a 12 month search, we’ve found a product that provides real time data replication for AIX. The product is called “EchoStream for AIX“. Even though it is new to Australia and New Zealand, EchoStream is already installed in many sites world-wide. EchoStream was developed by Vision Solutions (the same people who developed HACMP Clustering software), and we’ve signed as their marketing arm for Australia and New Zealand.

Some of the key benefits of EchoStream are:

• EchoStream for AIX is a true continuous data protection solution that delivers nearly instantaneous recovery of your data and applications at the push of a button-enabling you to easily recover data from any point in time.
• Recover large amounts of data in only minutes.
• Reverse data corruption in a fraction of the time/labor required for recovery from tape.
• Eliminate the exposure to major data loss of conventional backup and restore technologies.
• Achieve your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) simply and affordably.
• Get reliable disaster recovery by replicating your data to a remote location.

We’ll contact you 

So if you run IBM System p, we’ll talk to you soon about how EchoStream can help protect your business. Can’t wait? Call us on 1800 777 111.