The cloud is a means of delivering computing power as a service rather than as a product and it is ideally suited to DR. It offers scalability on demand and in a ‘private cloud’ it is operated solely for one company. Conventional Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) solutions are considered by some IT Managers to be expensive and complicated to run. For SMB sites running IBM i – the training, testing, monitoring & management of HA/DR and the cost of the second server, software & bandwidth made this a non-starter. This is why today 90% of all IBM i sites still use tape backups & cold DR for their disaster recovery solution. The cloud – with its combination of low cost virtualized backup hardware and fully hosted management is changing all that. Cloud based solutions are already enabling IBM i SMB businesses to achieve DR solutions with rapid recovery times and advanced security from data-loss. Maxava already have over 100 clients running in a cloud model.

Many businesses that run on IBM i do not have access to a Backup Datacenter or even a Backup IBM i Server. These businesses want to focus on their core activities and leave their Disaster Recovery to be fully managed by a Professional Availability Team who also provides Datacenter Services and Disaster Recovery Testing. This model is also known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Recovery as a Service (RaaS).

Using Cloud HA, Critical Data and Objects can be replicated transaction by transaction to a shared (virtualized) or private IBM i server in an offsite Datacenter at a secure remote location. The maxView widget, installed on the customers’ production server keeps them informed in real-time of their replication status while maxView manager allows the cloud provider to monitor multiple customers simultaneously.