Business Resiliency

Prevent outages - and recover quickly

Businesses strive to be resilient to a variety of outages from minor to catastrophic - or, in other words, to achieve business resiliency. The keys to a resilient z/OS® environment are incorporating preventative measures and responding quickly to failures such as: inadvertent (human) errors, data loss due to deletion or corruption, programming errors resulting in undesired results, system or application outages, loss of access to data, or loss of power, hardware, or processing facility.

To plan for prevention and quick recovery, businesses must look at the z/OS system infrastructure, hardware, applications, and human resources from the perspective of business resiliency.

Articles
Another Blackout? You Can’t Afford Not to Have the Right Data Backed Up!... Find out why backing up your data is so necessary, how to identify critical data, and how to reduce costs. Basic Concepts of ICF Catalog Backup and Recovery Discover the significance of backing up ICF catalogs and how this can be accomplished. Business Resiliency Solutions from Mainstar What does business resiliency mean in a z/OS environment? Myths and Truths About ABARS: Part I Is ABARS difficult to use? Find out the truth about ABARS, the DFSMShsm data mover. Myths and Truths About ABARS: Part II Does using ABARS increase the cost of DFSMShsm? Is ABARS slow? Learn more about ABARS. Myths and Truths About ABARS: Part III Is ABARS is useful for local data recovery? Do ABARS backup events often fail? Discover more in the third part of our series. Recovering ICF Catalogs at the Disaster Recovery Site Learn about the recover methodologies available for ICF catalogs and how to determine which is best for your data center. SYSchange: The Next Generation of Disaster Recovery Software by Mohammad Madani... Maintain system software integrity and avoid surprises at the DR site. The Trouble with Data - How Much to Back Up Discover how you can identify the data you need to back up - to reduce CPU, hardware, tape storage, and transportation costs.

Mainstar's industrial-strength business resiliency solutions enable businesses to be more resistant to all types of outages.

Data Asset Backup and Recovery: Without backups, data assets can't be recovered. How do you know whether all data assets have a backup and what is missing? Mainstar's Backup & Recovery Manager™ Suite provides complete data asset backup and recovery, and augments replication or remote mirroring technologies to create a truly resilient data asset protection program for the z/OS environment.
- ASAP™ identifies data assets used in z/OS environments so you know what needs to be backed up.
- ABARS Manager™ automates the IBM® DFSMShsm™ backup and recovery system, ABARS, to back up data from any level of the storage hierarchy.
- All/Star™ completes the data asset backup and recovery solution by providing an inventory of all backups performed by a variety of backups within the data center and, when combined with ASAP, alerts you if data assets haven't been backed up. All/Star provides visibility to all the backups in your environment.
z/OS Infrastructure Protection: With widespread reliance on IT systems, controls are needed to ensure changes have backups before the change was made to allow quick backout if necessary. Some of these changes can have an impact on all users of IT services. Without automatic backups, a serious problem could result that would take significant time to identify and back out of.
- SYSchange® provides for a resilient z/OS environment by backing up changed PDS members of z/OS system and other libraries and providing an audit. When a systems programmer makes a change to a PDS member, a backup is immediately taken and stored in an inventory along with who made the change, what was changed, and the date and time the change was made. Should the systems programmer need to back out of a change for any reason, the backup is easily and quickly recovered.
ICF Catalog Outages: An ICF catalog outage is a single point of failure in any z/OS environment and can lead to hours of downtime. Mainstar's Catalog RecoveryPlus™ (CR+™) enables the prevention of potential outages as well as forward recovery if necessary.
DFSMShsm Asset Protection: The IBM Data Facility Systems Managed Storage Hierarchical Storage Manager (DFSMShsm) manages thousands of data assets, both critical and non-critical, in licensed IT environments. Like ICF catalogs, DFSMShsm's Control Data Sets (CDS) are a single point of failure in any z/OS environment resulting in loss of access to thousands or millions of data assets. Mainstar's FastAudit™ can quickly reconcile these differences and build new records to enable data access.