The Oxford English dictionary defines a disaster as …………….
"(noun) (1) a sudden accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life, or (2) an event or fact leading to ruin or failure".

IBM defines a disaster as ………….
"an event recoverable from an offsite location only that has resulted from the unforeseen loss of a production system's computing capacity due solely to forces beyond your control".

Companies relying upon iSeries processors to run their businesses would be foolish to not have a Maintenance Agreement to cover the cost of repair when their system fails, regardless of how or why failure occurred. Sure, the Maintenance Agreement covers the repair, but time is a valuable commercial commodity, and loss of systems can affect the business through lost revenue and/or the cost of personnel standing idle. Time is money, and companies fail to understand the real value of their data.

Before we can propose a solution, we have to understand the problem, since no two businesses share a view on what constitutes a disaster.

At CVSI we can offer a range of support services to help customers through a period of crisis, and vulnerability. The table is intended to allow comparison of the various approaches for consideration.

Disaster Recovery Option	Location of Replacement	OS/400 Preloaded	Applications Preloaded	Typical Recovery Period *
				Customer Site	CVSI Recovery Centre
Replacement Processor	CVSI	Perhaps	No	24 hours minimum	24 hours minimum
Dedicated Replacement	CVSI	Yes	Yes	24 hours	8 hours
Dedicated Replacement	Customer Site	Yes	Yes	8 hours	24 hours
Note (*): These times are estimates, and depend upon unknown factors such as distance, physical location of backup media and time to reload data from backup media.

Any discussion about Disaster Recovery is an attempt to predict the unpredicatable, and over the years we have assisted customers in all scenarios, including recovery of an iSeries processor to our offices due to power failure at the customer's location.

Unlike Maintenance Agreements, Disaster Recovery procedures are covered by a Service Level Agreement, individually tailored to suit the customer's requirements, needs and expectations. CVSI can assist customers with this planning.

Remember: "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail"

Remember also that invoking the DR plan will typically cause a minimum disruption of 1 working day. If this is unacceptable, then customers should consider a High Availability solution, which can drastically reduce recovery time to minutes.