Over the years we have seen a shift from the simple need for backup and recovery, to a requirement for customers to have full access to systems and data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the year. In other words no down time. Our customers tend to be multi-location businesses and mostly have more than one IBM Power system, with IBM i.
Being multi-location brings an element of time shifting, when one location opens another closes allowing no clear quiet period without system activity for planned maintenance. Many customers have continual on-line activity which is constantly changing, this data needs to be available to service the online need. It can be noted that there is much similarity and cross-over between the business activities of Shield’s customers, they clearly fall into groups of common business interest.
For instance customers operate in the following sectors – Retail, Distribution, Food & Beverage, Manufacturing, Government and Service.
Retail & Distribution: sporting goods, household goods, home furnishings, storage systems, drug store and restaurant chain.
Business to Business, Transport: Office stationery, broadcasting equipment, trucking distribution, agricultural co-operative, import companies, and chemical plant.
Manufacturing & Distribution: Canopy awning producer, candy manufacturer, pipe equipment manufacturer.
Service Industry: Insurance, local government, municipalities, education and universities.
High Availability (HA4i) with the capability to switch a production system and backup system creates the opening for planned maintenance. It also affords an opportunity to exercise a ‘dry run’ for recovery after unplanned downtime. Many customers turn to Shield’s specialist product JQG4i alongside their HA solution for job queue replication to capture incomplete jobs at the time of an unplanned happening. For customers who never have a quiet period for maintenance, JQG4i can assist with exact switchover to the finest detail. Improving RPO more accurate recovery point objective, and RTO reduced recovery time objective are not always the highest priority, but can a business afford not to address this.
If you’d like to hear more about Shield’s product suite contact us at sales@shieldadvanced.com