Capture Point Restore: The Perfect Companion For High Availability

December 12, 2022

Ash Giddings

Businesses are constantly challenged by cyberattacks, coupled by their ever-increasing diverse nature. Ransomware and malicious data deletion or corruption can originate from both inside or outside of the business and staying out of the headlines by preventing attacks or at worst limiting the impact is high on the agenda for many.

There’s seemingly never a day goes by without a prominent attack being reported, damaging both the tangible capabilities to conduct business at the time, combined with intangible ongoing damage to business reputation that these destructive incidents invariably bring.

Many businesses have wisely invested in high availability for their IBM i environments, with these solutions such as Maxava HA, normally built on the efficiencies provided by remote journaling. These solutions are, rightly so, the go-to choice when looking to implement an added layer of resilience in an age when both intentional data corruption and inadvertent data loss are on the rise. But is having a high availability solution enough?

A good high availability solution largely goes unnoticed by replicating data from a designated source machine to a chosen target or targets and will include both self-monitoring and self-healing. If corruption occurs on the source or production machine, the high availability solution will, quite rightly, replicate that corruption to the target resulting in corrupt data on multiple servers, making recovery problematic. This is where Maxava Capture Point Restore (CPR) fits in.

Capture Point Restore provides the ability to capture a selection of critical data at designated points or times, and archive it, all transparent to the underlying application and without impacting the users. The capture point can be configured to automatically occur at chosen times – for example every 4 hours – or prior to major events such as an overnight update or invoicing run. The archive can be stored literally anywhere, locally on another IBM i, or even another platform altogether; anywhere where FTP access is capable.

For some businesses storing archives in the cloud may be an attractive option, potentially going some way towards satisfying regulatory compliance. Increasingly popular are backup architectures looking to implement a 3-2-1 rule; that is 3 copies of data to 2 different types of media along with 1 offsite location. Retention rules can be defined making Capture Point Restore a vital cog by storing data sets offsite.

Another use for Capture Point Restore might be Business Intelligence, capturing a subset of data before restoring it to an alternative server for reporting purposes and away from the demands of production workload.

For those running older versions of the operating system, Maxava Capture Point Restore will run on V5R3 and all later versions of the operating system, while both internal and external disk is supported. For some it offers a way of implementing a simple, lightweight form of protection for legacy applications. Both archiving and recovering from previous archives are made simple by way of a graphical user interface.

Maxava Capture Point Restore complements Maxava HA, will work with an alternative HA solution or run totally independently to help provide confidence that business critical data can be recovered should the need arise.

For more information on Maxava Capture Point Restore, the perfect companion for high availability, or for a free trial please visit: https://www.maxava.com/capture-point-restore-ibm-i

Ash Giddings is a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022.

This content is sponsored by Maxava.

Capture Point Restore: The Perfect Companion For High Availability

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