IBM's AIX Logical Volume Management (LVM) provides many options for software storage configuration, allowing you to tune your I/O performance and system availability using striping, mirroring, specific disk placement, etc. After a full system failure, recovering an AIX server to its previous configuration, even when using AIX mksysb or NIM (AIX Network Installation Manager), can become a difficult and time-consuming task. Add a change in disk or system hardware to the process and you may experience days of downtime and lost revenues.

While SBAdmin for AIX is an advanced tape and disk backup management solution, it is the ability to completely rebuild a system, from bare-metal, that distinguishes SBAdmin from competing products. SBAdmin is the leader in Adaptable System Recovery (ASR), which provides the unique ability to recover an entire AIX system (ROOTVG and any other volume groups) and install it onto the the same or dissimilar hardware.

Most bare-metal restore (BMR) products create disk images that limit the flexibility necessary when restoring onto dissimilar hardware. SBAdmin records your system and storage configuration with each system backup, and then uses this information to rebuild the system from the ground up. Since we are rebuilding the system and not copying the system, you can make changes to that configuration to restore onto completely different hardware. This makes SBAdmin ideal solution for hardware migration and provisioning/cloning scenarios.