An effective ibm disaster recovery plan is vital for any company to ensure business continuity should an unplanned event occur. These events can range from natural disasters (flood, earthquake, landslide, volcano, tornado) to man-made events like cyber attacks, hardware or software failure, power disruptions, fires, employee errors and more. While these unplanned interruptions are difficult to prepare for, they can be even more challenging for small and midsize businesses that lack the resources and budget of large corporations.
An IBM i Disaster Recovery strategy helps SMBs minimize downtime from a data center outage or natural disaster and get back to business faster. It also provides an affordable alternative to traditional disaster recovery techniques that rely on tape backup, which can leave gaps in the data protection process and result in extended downtime for critical applications and data.
A successful IBM i Disaster Recovery plan requires both practice and technology solutions. IT Solutions Group offers a full spectrum of technologies that can strengthen your disaster recovery and business continuity plan, from simple backup methodologies to automated backup and restore technologies that save your IBM i data in near-real-time to an offsite location.
Depending on your RPO and RTO requirements, you can choose from multiple options to achieve the best results for your IBM i disaster recovery plan. For example, you can use a DR testing environment to measure performance and compare configurations before deploying your backup and restoration procedures in your production environment. A DR test environment can help you identify and prioritize backups and restorations, as well as verify your backups and restore processes against your backup and recovery objectives.
As the recovery process for a Disaster Recovery environment begins, IBM personnel will communicate with you on an hourly basis regarding their progress toward meeting your RPO and RTO objectives. This communication includes the status of your recovery, such as the number of hours from when the disaster was declared to when IBM restored your Production environment service.
When the DR process for your Production environment or data center is complete, IBM will notify you that the process is finished. When the notification is sent, you can begin to access the restored Production environment and resume normal operations.
Before activating a DR Disaster Recovery instance, you must ensure that the emergency site and your production site are aligned in terms of replication. This is called a “site-switch.” Zerto will start backward replication to retrofit all updates that happened on the emergency site and revert the replication flow (production to emergency) to its original state.
Once you have synchronized the two sites, you can activate the disaster recovery site by executing a command on the emergency IBM Cloud Private instance. This command shuts down the production instance, closes the database connections on the emergency instance and reverts the replication to its original state. Once the DR site is activated, you can start production again by using a script on the DR site that starts the production VMs on the emergency instance and opens the database connections to the correct databases in your production environment.