Disaster Recovery / Remote Journaling / HA et al

["Troy Hyde" <troy.hyde@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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