Preparing an IBM Disaster Recovery Plan

ibm disaster recovery plan
A comprehensive business continuity strategy protects your data and operations in case of a catastrophic event. Depending on your business needs, you may choose to replicate your data to a remote location for immediate access or back up your data in the long term. You can also prepare for a site interruption by switching your Production environment capabilities to use a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment. The DR environment is backed up and synced with the latest data from your Production environment to reduce the impact of a site failure.

During normal protection operation, IBM backs up your database and auxiliary data each hour to the DR instance, which is located in a separate IBM SoftLayer data center from your Production environment. In addition, your web and application data is backed up each day to the DR instance. You can also create local backups to a local storage device for quick access in the event of an unplanned event.

Your Production and DR environments are connected through a private IBM SoftLayer network. Your Production environment is backed up to the DR instance using the high availability disaster recovery (HADR) option. The HADR replication solution, Zerto, is configured to maintain an asynchronous replication state between your Production environment and the DR instance. In the event of a disaster, you can switch your production to use the DR environment to continue processing orders. The DR environment is backed up daily to ensure that it has the latest order data.

When a disaster occurs, you activate your DR process to switch your Sterling Order Management Pre-Production environment into a temporary Production environment. IBM then activates the disaster recovery process to begin restoring your backed-up Production environment to the DR instance. This process takes several hours.

Once the DR processes complete, you clean up the DR test IBM Cloud Private instance and return it to its normal protection state. This step can take up to four hours.

You must know and preserve the data that is maintained on IBM Cloud, including the DataStage flows you have in projects, connection information to external data sources used by your DataStage flows, and all project files. You must also be prepared to restore your DB2 database. You can restore the DB2 database to a different service instance, to the same instance, or to another environment on the same system. When restoring the DB2 database, you can select a specific point in time from the last backup operation that was completed before you created your disaster recovery plan. The plan file contains a list of instructions for recovering your IBM Spectrum Protect server. You can modify these instructions by entering site-specific information in the RECOVERY.INSTRUCTIONS stanzas in the plan file. You can also break out the stanzas of the disaster recovery plan into individual files. This makes it easier to manage the stanzas when you need them. You can also store additional recovery commands in the stanzas that you can retrieve and execute from the command line after you recover your server.