Fujitsu has significantly reduces losses in time and costs in the constant battle against IT downtime by introducing an expanded high availability concept for Fujitsu BS2000/OSD mainframes, at the Fujitsu Mainframe Summit in Fulda, Germany.
In a world first, Fujitsu Live Migration (LM) is the only feature for mainframe operating systems to maximise availability of business-critical applications and virtual machines with no disruption to users or loss of service, while the Automated Cluster Failover feature, Fujitsu High Availability (HA), enables fast, secure and reliable server availability.
To the IT industry, HA enables IT departments to keep business-critical services and applications running through downtimes resulting from either planned operations, such as routine maintenance and system expansion, or unplanned events such as hardware failures, power outages, operating errors, and natural disasters.
Customers benefit from an “always-on” availability of their mainframe infrastructure, ensuring business continuity, better serviceability and scalability, and lower total cost of ownership.
Fujitsu Live Migration (LM) enables customers to relocate the mainframe operating system and applications, both native and virtual, from one server to another – all with no noticeable downtime.
LM is a world-wide first for mainframe operating systems and is currently the only such solution available in the market. By ensuring continuous operation of business-critical applications, LM shaves hours off the time previously required for operations such as server maintenance and workload management.
While Fujitsu Live Migration ensures high availability during planned downtime, Automated Cluster Failover provides equally high protection during unplanned downtime. Fujitsu HA offers customers a quick and painless server recovery solution in a cluster configuration.
When a mainframe server fails, HA systems can be restarted virtually immediately and with no data loss by automatically transferring the operating system infrastructure, as well as all applications and data, to another server in the cluster. Customers can easily configure the process and prioritise the availability of individual mainframe guest systems and applications.
Fujitsu HA is a dramatic improvement over previous mainframe high availability scenarios. Normally, the process would take several hours, depending on the distance to the remote recovery location.
This involved a number of time-consuming tasks, including moving over the latest version of tapes, setting up the cold stand-by server, and loading the operating system and data. With HA, this is all done automatically and completed within minutes.
“The proven innovative power and ability to simplify complexity, means mainframes continue to play an important role in today’s data centre,” says Uwe Neumeier, VP Server System Sales, Fujitsu Technology Solutions.
“The Fujitsu BS2000/OSD mainframe has earned a reputation for long-term compatibility, high flexibility and availability, plus outstanding scalability and robustness – not to mention automation and easy administration – which all lead to higher efficiency in administrative environments.”