IBM i Data Protection and Resiliency Solutions

Skytap can provide data protection, service resiliency, and business continuity features to customers with production workloads in Skytap. These features include:

Traditional on-premises IBM i servers typically have access to tape libraries, archival disk storage, and storage-based data replication—capabilities that don’t exist in a cloud-based data center, such as a Skytap environment.

Skytap customers can use the well-developed ecosystem of IBM and third-party solutions for IBM i to provide data protection and resiliency capabilities. This article provides a high-level guide to locating partner solutions to satisfy customer requirements for data protection, service resiliency, and business continuity. It covers the key customer usage scenarios and facilities available to support them. The third-party solutions listed here haven’t been tested by Skytap.

Partner solutions available to Skytap customers

Backup and Restore Disaster Recovery High Availability
Objective Restore application services from a standby Skytap environment, with minimal outage. Failover application services to a standby Skytap environment, with zero outage. Restore data within LPAR to a known good state.
Solutions IBM Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) with IBM Cloud Storage Solutions (ICC) Logical replication based: Hardware based:
Methodology

Back up with BRMS to virtual tape or optical devices, followed by ICC transfer of local virtual save media from Skytap to cloud storage.

Restore by transferring save media from cloud storage into Skytap using ICC, followed by BRMS restore from the local save media.

Use logical replication-based products over TCP/IP to replicate transactions from primary to standby environments.
Use PowerHA SystemMirror Enterprise Edition with asynchronous Geographic Mirroring over TCP/IP to implement DR architectures with standby environment hosted in Skytap. Use PowerHA SystemMirror Standard Edition with synchronous Geographic Mirroring over TCP/IP to implement HA architectures with standby environment hosted in Skytap.

The third-party solutions listed here haven’t been tested by Skytap.