News

posted on 15 May 2008 10:50

EMC has announced a 2-site mainframe disaster recovery product that provides the first real competition for IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex at the 2-site level.

Mainframe computer sites can be connected and secondary sites kept up to date with the primary site's state and data across wide area network (WAN) distances by the IBM GDPS product. If the first site goes down then a backup site automatically takes over.

EMC's Geographically Dispersed Disaster Restart (GDDR) product was first available in early 2007 as a 3-site z-series disaster recovery product for mainframes with Symmetrix drive arrays. It used EMC's SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) software for synchronous and asynchronous data replication between the sites.

At the time EMC said IBM's offering (GDPS) typically required lengthy planning processes, complex custom scripting, extended debug and test periods, and expensive, long term service contracts. EMC reckoned GDDR was up to to half the cost, faster to deploy, and easier to manage.

Now it has introduced a 2-site version, said to cost just 25 percent of the equivalent implementation costs of GDPS and again take far less time to install and implement. It enables a 2-site mainframe and Symmetrix drive array setup to automatically restart operations on the DR site if the primary becomes unavailable.

David Donatelli, President of EMC's Storage Division, said: "By extending these capabilities to customers with two-site mainframe operations, we are expanding the market for this critical functionality."

Customers can use EMC GDDR software to automate failover operations during planned outages such as maintenance operations and upgrades, and test their disaster restart operations without writing, verifying, and maintaining custom scripts.

The new software is available now.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}