Disaster Recovery / Remote Journaling / HA et al

Hey all,

It appears that I may soon be receiving an assignment to begin developing a home grown disaster recovery system to offer to our clients.

We have a couple of hundred clients around the country that all have their own servers running V5R3 through V6R1. The recovery plan of most of our clients is a nightly backup of the data that is transmitted visa secure FTP to our backup servers. If a disaster occurs, we provide a new server loaded with their most recent data and program libraries.

Although this has the obvious advantage of being a relatively inexpensive solution, the data is only as current as the most recent completed backup. For many of our clients this is sufficient. They are small institutions with not a large amount of data and a relatively small number of transactions.

However, many are desiring a more robust solution. They (like everyone) want to minimize data loss and downtime.

I've read a lot of the archives that discuss disaster recovery and high availability. It seems most of the discussion revolves around support of Mimix and other like solutions.

At this point my query boils down to this: I'm leaning toward developing a solution utilizing remote journaling but I don't have a lot of experience with journals at al let alone remote journaling. Does anyone have any suggestions as to redbooks, articles, books or training that can get a couple of my team members up to speed on journaling and other disaster recover options?

Of course, if anyone feels like I'm heading in the wrong direction, I'd love to hear that as well. My ego can handle whatever criticisms and direction anyone is willing to offer.

Thanks,
T