The NFL season has kicked off and fans are watching the execution of weeks of training, practice and rehearsal.

Running the same plays over and over. Incorporating adjustments and nuances that the coaching staff wants to improve plays for certain game situations. Putting it all together on game day to deliver a win for the fans.

Football teams call it practice, but it’s really rehearsal.

Rehearsal sharpens the focus, eliminates mistakes and prepares for the unexpected. This is not only present in football but in many other professions. Take for example actors and actresses in a Broadway play, or fire fighters, or the US Military.

Rehearsal is also an important part of Information Technology. Iterative testing of applications, for example, is a form of rehearsal designed to work out the variations of application inputs to mitigate failures and deliver a higher quality of service to customers.

Disaster recovery or business contingency planning both require rehearsal to ensure services can be restored at alternate locations. Cyber resiliency also requires rehearsed to help ensure the business can mitigate a cybersecurity incident.

Obviously, the objective of rehearsing is to improve an organization’s ability to survive these events with little or no downtime. Having the right infrastructure in place supporting these initiatives is key to strengthening an organizations cyber resiliency.

That’s where IBM z systems can help.

IBM Z Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency is a new Capacity on Demand offering available on IBM z16 servers.

Flexible Capacity enables you to shift capacity between participating IBM z16 servers at different sites and use the target configuration for up to a year. This capability helps organizations dynamically shift production capacity between IBM z16 systems at different locations within seconds.

It can be used for proactive outage avoidance and DR testing scenarios. Workloads can be seamlessly shifted to an alternate site and still meet production SLA’s.

The transfer of capacity can be fully automated with solutions like GDPS and remain at the alternate site for up to one year. Flex Capacity integrates with IBM Z features like System Recovery Boost and workload startup.

Flex Capacity improves audit readiness by using the same procedures for both DR testing and real unplanned disasters. Flex Capacity provides the capability to rehearse unplanned outages and cybersecurity threat scenarios.

Generally speaking, the more you rehearse, the better you perform in real-life situations. That’s how Flexible Capacity can help your organization maneuver sudden problems.

LRS IT Solutions can help you implement Flexible Capacity in your environment. Contact us for a consultation today!

About the author

John Duffy Jr. is an IBM Z Solution Advisor with LRS IT Solutions. He has been involved with mainframes since 1981 in various roles from Operations, Technical Support, Consulting, and Technical Sales, and he spent 21 years working with IBM.