IBM Introduces World's Fastest Global Business Continuity Technology


ARMONK, NY -- April 21, 2004 /Wi-Fi Technology News/- IBM announced a breakthrough storage technology that is designed to help clients protect and recover critical data at global backup locations at some of the fastest speeds available.

Called IBM Global Mirror for Enterprise Storage, the technology provides global backup and recovery protection at speeds approaching those achievable at local distances. Beginning in May, clients can employ the technology as part of disaster recovery solutions designed to help protect them from regional events such as hurricanes or earthquakes.

IDC anticipates that worldwide spending on information security and business continuity will grow twice as fast as general IT spending over the next several years, reaching more than $118 billion by 2007. [1]

Today's newly announced IBM? TotalStorage? Global Mirror for the IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server? (ESS) is part of a line-up of innovative technologies that IBM provides to help address customers' top priorities in business continuity -- high availability, continuous operations and disaster recovery.

"In the context of outages -- planned or unplanned -- every second is of critical importance," said Tom Hawk, general manager of Enterprise Storage, IBM. "The value of lost -- or saved -- data is virtually incalculable. Global Mirror is designed to help customers maintain high availability among business processes and key business applications in a cost-conscious manner -- across the globe and at some of the fastest speeds available today."

Blazing Speed at Global Distance
Global Mirror uses breakthrough innovations within asynchronous PPRC (peer-to-peer remote copy) technology to help speed disk mirroring at distances more than 300 kilometers with a delay that can be as low as three to five seconds -- outpacing similar EMC offerings. [2] The new solution is designed to move data great distances at high speeds while maintaining the integrity of the data in transit.

The solution is also designed to allow massive data transfers while avoiding disruption to IT performance or availability. The exceptional performance of Global Mirror for ESS requires only two fibre channel links per storage system where a number of other comparable technologies may require four links. This performance can help reduce infrastructure costs and lower TCO.

Global Mirror is also designed to provide business continuity functionality for large-scale applications that store data across multiple disk systems or have data managed by different types of hosts. Some other offerings may not be able to achieve this level of functionality without installing specialized host-based software which may add costs and create unnecessary complexity for IT administrators.

IBM TotalStorage Resiliency Family
Global Mirror is a key element of the newly announced TotalStorage Resiliency Family -- a set of disaster recovery and business continuity offerings from IBM based on integrated server and application solutions. It is one of the most comprehensive sets of business continuity features available in the marketplace, and includes integrated and automated solutions designed to provide capabilities ranging from basic backup and restore, to multi-site "real-time" disaster recovery for clients -- helping businesses better align IT costs according to the value of various forms of information.

The Resiliency Family includes solutions that can help provide integrated and automated management of disaster recovery for host environments. These solutions include GDPS/PPRC Hyperswap?, HACMP/XD, eRCMF, GDS for MSCS. Clients will also have the option to include application automation for SAP and Automated System Cloning for SAP.

"In any unplanned outage, disaster recovery is about achieving resumption of service at the application and user level," stated Tom Hawk. "Resiliency Family can help achieve this by providing the applications staff the ability to perform a fast, repeatable and consistent application and database restart -- supporting hardware recovery, data integrity and data consistency."

IBM TotalStorage Global Mirror for ESS is available worldwide for both IBM eServer? zSeries? systems and open systems in May 2004. IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services will be incorporating this new technology as part of its rapid recovery portfolio as it continues to address our clients requirements for shorter recovery times and continuous availability of critical business information.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com. For more information on IBM's on demand strategy, visit http://www.ibm.com/ondemand.



[1] Source: IDC, "Worldwide IT Security and Business Continuity Forecast, 2002-2007," September 2003.

[2] Source: "SRDF/Asynchronous - A Technical Description," page 8. Available at: http://www.emc.com/products/software/srdf_a/interstitial/srdf_a_interstitial.jsp