RE: Disaster/recovery Plan for BPCS

[Nick Camino <ncamino@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Antonio,

You have broached a topic near and dear to me so I thought I would provide some 
tips that have served me well over the years.

One of the most important issues in disaster recovery is to understand the 
cost-benefit relationship with regards to protecting your data.  The rule is:  
The cost increases logarithmically the closer you get to real time data 
recovery. The practical application of the rule states that the cost for 
getting back data in a day is very cheap and can be handled by a good 
backup/recovery procedure.  If for example you want to have immediate failure 
on a hardware error, that is going to cost you.  You have to asses if your 
business demands 100% uptime or can it settle with less. Most shops do not have 
100% uptime requirements, although they like to think they do, so be honest 
when you gather your requirements.

Several BPCS clients I have worked with developed High-Availability solutions 
using 3rd party products such as MIMIX from Lakeview Technologies or 
DataMirror.  These products can replicate your BPCS production data to other 
iSeries machines or iSeries partitions.  The beauty of this solution is that it 
provides complete data redundancy on a separate platform while minimizing the 
CPU impact on your production machine.

Journaling does provide some protection but at a fairly high CPU cost.  I would 
think long and hard about the using journaling before implementing it as the 
sole data recovery solution.  For now I would focus on having a rock solid 
backup and recovery process in place, be sure to test your recovery procedure 
at least twice a year.

Since you are new to BPCS I would suggest reading the SSA Redbook 
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg245410.html?Open
The book is a couple years old now but has some great tips for implementing 
BPCS and keeping your environment running smoothly. You can download it free 
from IBM or have it shipped to you for around $40.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to email me at
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