The high availability and having HyperSwap has taken us beyond five nines for reliability. Our CTO said that we have now reached 100%. We have had no outages now for literally six years and that's really impressive.

We are a very large company and have a huge workload that is really spiky. Previously, when we were on a different vendor's disk, their replication for our data recovery (DR) would fail and we’d have these long outages to DR.

Now, with Global Mirror, if we get an inordinate amount of data, the RPO elongates and then goes right back down. I like to refer to this like an accordion. It kind of stretches and then comes right back down. We have two to five second recoverability.

Besides the performance, those were some of our biggest issues. There are a lot of other features that have been really important to us. We are a huge DB2 shop and IBM has developed many different products to work with DB2 to help speed it up. Other vendors cannot offer this.

You have fewer boxes to maintain. The throughput increases, and the features are the same, just better.

The main benefit is from the standpoint of recovery; recovery time and being able to quickly replicate data. We've had a lot of success and it's taken us a long way to get to where we've come from. There were a lot longer times that it took us to recover in the past. From a disaster recovery and availability aspect, it's brought us a long way. And we certainly are able to do a lot more in much less time, as far as recovery objectives.

The benefits are that you don't need to manage it very often, administration is less.