Business Continuity Cloud ? IBM's Bold Move | Managed Hosting

IBM has decided to offer support for virtual mainframes. This is likely an attempt to gain more customers for its disaster recovery services. But is this something many prospective customers will be willing to go with? Would you feel safe having your mainframe in the cloud?

There are incentives, though. The major one being that cloud computing is bringing down costs associated with business continuity recovery services. But how low would the costs get before businesses really decide to give up their physical backup data centers? In theory it makes a lot of sense for IT to avoid the capital expense involved in building a backup data center and just paying for access to virtual machines, data backups and storage.

Something important was pointed out by IBM?s chief technology officer for Business Continuity Recovery Services, Rich Cocchiara: There is a deliberate move towards a replication environment for all critical servers (in the cloud) and this includes the mainframe.

IBM?s cloud-based disaster recovery approach shouldn?t be confused with its traditional solutions. In the case of the virtualized solutions there is no need to make a call to IBM. Furthermore, they can be spun up quickly or they could be left online. This isn?t possible yet with their mainframe disaster recovery services. What IBM is trying to achieve is create mechanisms that allow users to initiate failover and also ensure that the provisioning process is automated on the backend.

In addition to this, IBM is also working on the use of analytics to anticipate outages and initiate fail over when deemed appropriate. This can be likened to a tornado warning system. This will help put data in safe locations before any outage occurs.

But while IBM might have great ideas on the way forward for mainframes, many of their prospective customers seem to be extremely conservative on this. These are early days, though, and with the advances we have seen in the last few years you can never say, ?NEVER!?

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Source: http://www.managed.com/business-continuity-cloud-ibms-bold-move/

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