Re: Disaster Recovery / Remote Journaling / HA et al

Likely the correct direction. Remote receivers from your customers to the same machine that they FTP the backups to. The "Short Course" is you restore the FTP'd backups and then apply the journals to that backup, Shazaaam you're current. That is, the sum of the two is a restore up the most recent journal entry. Note that this is for data only. You must also handle program changes, password updates, new users, file creations, device creation or changes, File modifications, system value changes and other objects as well. Its all about how close to 'right this second' does your recovery have to be. You know the customers and clearly the applications better than we possibly could so you may be able to say there will be no program changes for example, we have to consider those. You may be able to write your own journal apply program (non-trivial) or leverage one of the commercial products out there uch as iTera, Mimix, etc.


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 6/10/2013 10:46 PM, Troy Hyde wrote:

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