IBM Launches Smart Cloud for Disaster Recovery, Data Archive

IBM has announced two new cloud services that enable users to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data in minutes—versus days—in the event of a disaster.  

The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services enable customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could before within a traditional data center environment, IBM officials said. The IBM SmartCloud offers companies of various sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service that continuously replicates their applications and all associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. This enables them to have their business up and running in minutes after declaring an outage in their IT infrastructure. 

Moreover, IBM’s cloud enables customers to securely manage and balance workloads, lower application and system downtime and reduce data loss. These services help clients avoid capital expense by more efficiently monitoring operational expenses and service levels, reducing the burden on IT staff.

"Now more than ever, companies are relying on a massive amount of data to run their businesses, storing it longer and retrieving it as needed," Rick Ruiz, general manager of IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, said in a statement. "This creates a need for a business resilience strategy that will ensure continuous operation and create a competitive advantage to enable growth opportunities. Our new cloud services bring flexibility, scalability and rapid provisioning to help accomplish that."

The new services include the IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, which increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help practically eliminate business downtime, and minimize data loss, IBM said. The service provides clients with an easy-to-use portal for remote access to rapidly bring back their business on IBM’s recovery infrastructure in case of outage, replicating both server software and associated data continuously. And it eliminates the issues of recovery on physical non-like hardware and travel to disaster sites.

The other service is the IBM SmartCloud Archive, which is designed specifically to meet stringent privacy and regulatory compliance, from advanced search and indexing and retrieval, to eDiscovery capabilities. This service provides clients with an advanced document and records management system to deal with structured and unstructured content. It also provides control over rising data-storage costs and improved availability of critical business content, IBM officials said.

The new services complement IBM’s existing SmartCloud Managed Backup offering, which has been used by hundreds of clients for the past two years. The cloud-based managed backup services provide flexible, automatic management and monitoring of backup and recovery processes, including hardware, software, installation and support, and can be delivered in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment.

This service can be combined with the Archive and Virtualized services for storage, data protection and replication. Other cloud-based business-continuity tools include the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery, which provides disaster-recovery software that can be enabled as a cloud-storage option.

Meanwhile, IBM officials said the company has been working with the USGA (United States Golf Association) since 2008 on a variety of information-protection services, including building a comprehensive infrastructure-recovery solution.

"With new regulations like compliance and increasing security and data demands on our network, we have made it a priority to protect our data and ensure we have the right disaster-recovery plan in place," Jessica Carroll, managing director of Information Technologies at USGA, said in a statement. "In working with IBM on this multi-year project and tapping their business resilience and cloud expertise, we have put in place a flexible infrastructure-recovery solution that ensures the availability and resiliency of our core business functions."

The two new services will be available starting July 19. They are a part of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio, consisting of next-generation, enterprise cloud technologies and services offerings for private, public and hybrid clouds based on IBM hardware, software, services and best practices.