Re: Disaster Recovery / Remote Journaling / HA et al

Troy,

Arbor Solutions in Grand Rapids MI has a more lightweight data replication tool that will do what you suggest you want to write. I know they put many 100s of hours into creating it. It's also very affordable and I'm sure Mike (the owner) would be willing to discuss a discounting plan for your situation. (I run a copy for one of my clients and it works quite well without much overhead or management, and I am not affiliated with Arbor except as a customer)

For the IFS/DLO, I wrote a CL that uses SAVRSTxxx to move those objects every so often, in this case about every 2 hours, so those object types are covered. If your interested, give me a private reply and we can work something out as Agile Technology owns it, and I'll have to get some leagaleeze covered before it's distributed.

There are a couple of other 3rd tier products for data replication out there, NoMax comes to mind on that one. I run a copy of that for a customer and do not recommend trying it, but that and a couple of others are out there. You might consider the cost of your efforts vs. a pre-written solution. On one hand it's an investment in a salable product, on the other hand I think the scope might be somewhat larger than you think it is.

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 6/10/2013 9:46 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