IBM level seven Disaster recovery solution

There is no need to say much about the importance of disaster tolerance to the enterprise, in a global economic environment that requires 24x7 operation, no enterprise can afford downtime, whether it is planned downtime (upgrades, maintenance, and repairs) or sudden outages (due to human error, handling failure, power failure, or even disaster events). But many companies have a business continuity plan to restore core applications within 24-48 hours. Although the data has been lost for 24 hours, it will take days or weeks to achieve full recovery. These enterprises often rely on background and manual processes to keep the business running until the system recovers.

As information becomes an increasingly important enterprise asset, many enterprises are committed to minimizing the risk of downtime and avoiding the potential impact of business outages, thereby affecting:

Productivity: Because the system is idle, your employees and business operations can cause loss of revenue.

Customer Satisfaction: If you do not respond to customer needs in a timely manner, simply click the mouse and they will turn to another vendor.

Business partner and vendor relationships: Frequent downtime raises questions about the reliability of your business, driving important partners and suppliers to business with other businesses.

In fact, experts claim that a typical computing infrastructure outage is estimated at $42,000 per hour. At this rate, 1% per cent of usability improvements could result in millions of of dollars of revenue being created by reducing risk and increasing productivity. IBM Windows Business Continuity (CA) is designed to help your enterprise significantly reduce downtime, provide high availability, and improve disaster recovery for critical applications.

Disaster backup technology scenario seven levels: 7 Tiers for Disaster Recovery Solution, refers to the definition of international standard share 78, the disaster backup technology program can be divided into seven levels according to the following major aspects of the degree achieved.

At present, most of the manufacturers of disaster-tolerant technology reached the 6th level, only responsible for replicating data, not automatically take over and start the application function. But a lot of users are really pursuing the seventh level of disaster-tolerant solution, that is, to automatically judge the timing of switching, automatic switching, automatic start application, and so on, minimizing the human intervention in the process of disaster-tolerant switching, reducing human error judgments.

This paper will focus on the real seventh-level automatic disaster-tolerant implementation.

IBM's own storage disaster-tolerant software (Metro Mirror), combined with mainframe dual-computer software such as the Hacmp-xd on AIX, can reach a truly level 7 solution.

Hacmp-xd with IBM's storage disaster-tolerant software, Metro Mirror, which integrates autonomic management capabilities. While ensuring the consistency of data, it also increases the automatic recovery of applications, making the system and application recovery faster and more reliable (the entire recovery process can be achieved by hand, in accordance with the disaster recovery process).

The 7 layer can achieve 0 data loss rates, while ensuring that data is immediately automatically transmitted to the Recovery center. The 7 tier is considered the highest level of disaster recovery, with both local and remote data being updated, leveraging dual online storage and complete network switching capabilities.

HACMP/XD is a software technology designed for two of hosts in different locations to support each other. It extends the functionality of HACMP on high availability. Definition of a disaster backup, the production center host environment must have no single points of failure (failure). However, HACMP only provides high availability within the LAN (LAN), Hageo Hacmp/xd is the ability to provide data backup/restart of wide area network (WAN) applications over HACMP. Hacmp/xd is an extension of the concept of HACMP, so the rules applicable to HACMP also apply to Hageo hacmp/xd. It and the Metro Mirror (Synchronous disaster recovery) function in the IBM storage server to realize remote disaster preparedness function, thereby improving the usability of the whole system. Automate switching through the HACMP Cluster Management feature to reduce the time of system downtime and recovery when disaster events occur.

The solution design allows cluster resources to automatically failover between the two sites that contain replicas of the backup data. And a copy of the backup data is provided by the Metro Mirror software running on the storage system. If the primary site's disk system, network, or processor fails, or if the entire site is compromised, the recovery site uses a copy of the data from the remote location to automatically restart the application in minutes, minimizing end user business disruption. Once the primary system or site is restored to normal, data and applications can be automatically rolled back to the primary system or site.

As an essential part of the IBM Business Continuity solution, the Metro Mirror software integrates the IBM System Storage DS Disk System family. It supports a wide range of IBM and non-IBM operating systems, including IBM z/OS, Z/VM, os/400, I5/os? , Microsoft windows and Aix 5L? Operating systems, as well as Linux, HP-UX, Sun SOLARIS, Novell NetWare, and UNIX? Metro Mirror Design a remote site in the urban area always maintains an up-to-date copy of the primary location data (usually using the dense wavelength division multiplexing technique, which can be as long as 300 km apart).

Synchronous mirroring technology is designed to maintain data dissemination between two sites. During a planned or unexpected failure, IBM CAW automatically switches the workload to a backup system, and then quickly restarts critical applications. Because mirrored data is an image that is consistent with the source data, it helps to avoid long, complex data recovery processes before resuming business operations. We also provide an advanced heartbeat mechanism to help monitor the state of the remote cluster nodes, even when the network fails.

Value of IBM Business continuity Solutions

Business Continuity addresses key factors that affect the business agility and management standards of the enterprise: availability, time to restart the system after a disaster, data protection, and the distance between the primary and the backup system. By automating continuous, secure data replication for backup and streamlining complex data, systems, and network management processes, IBM business continuity can help streamline operations, reduce human error, and protect critical applications and data.

The success of an enterprise depends on the availability of applications, networks, and data. Downtime every minute will allow the enterprise to suffer loss of revenue, missed business opportunities, reduce customer loyalty, and even can not comply with government norms. IBM Business Continuity solutions are the best option if the enterprise needs a solution that supports the availability of critical data and applications. The IBM solution is a comprehensive, proven solution designed and passed a reliability test. It can significantly reduce planning and burst failures, cluster upgrades, and system maintenance without disrupting business uptime.

IBM will also work closely with the enterprise to provide a cost-effective solution to business needs and business priorities through assessment, planning and installation, testing, training, and long-term support.