How much data is the average IBM i site changing on a daily basis? And what would it look like in the real world?
Those are the questions posed by Maxava’s Simon O’Sullivan in an intriguing new blog post on the HA specialist’s website.
O’Sullivan points out that a single transaction can be made up of many data adds, updates, deletes, moves and changes.
O’Sullivan says: “We’ve found that, on average, a small IBM i site will replicate around three gigabytes of journal transactions over 24 hours, while a medium-sized site generates around 17 gigabytes.”
The senior VP says that Maxava’s experience is that a large Power i users can move well over 40 GB per day. Indeed, many of the company’s larger customers will replicate as much as 200 GB per day.
He says: “The University of Berkeley describes one gigabyte of data as being roughly equivalent to a pickup truck filled with books. So that’s saying that even a small IBM i site changes the equivalent of three pickup trucks’ worth of data per day. Who can afford to lose that much data in a disaster?”
It’s a good question, the answer to which may lie in one of the great dichotomies of the Power i market. Because while worrying about the data they are charged to protect is high on many midrange managers’ agendas, the reality of doing much about it seems rather less so.
HelpSystems’ recent IBM i Marketplace Survey revealed that nearly half (48.6%) of i sites do not use a high availability solution. True, that figure falls to 33.3% in Europe but it shows that there is still a lot to play for in this key area.
According to O’Sullivan, most companies don’t realise how much data is at risk. To help, Maxava has created a free new Discovery Report service on its website.
O’Sullivan says: “We’re finding that, for the most part, even the most efficient and well-resourced organisations just don’t have this information – which does make it very difficult for them to adequately plan for disaster recovery. And even though business IT surveys repeatedly show that disaster recovery is high, if not top, on a CIO’s to-do list, there are still many, many IBM i sites out there that are currently backing up their systems to magnetic tape media just once a day.”