RE: IBM i Hosting - Disaster Recovery

We've had two main disaster recovery plans over the past several years.

1) Hot Site plan with IBM. I'm not sure if they're still in the hot site business or not. Their site was in Northern New Jersey; at the time we were in South Plainfield, NJ.

2) Hot Site plan with SunGard. Primarily at their Philadelphia location, although for a few years we were at their location outside Chicago.

Both plans 1 & 2 were for a system not quite as big as our production system, but adequate to prove things would work. Originally SunGard reserved a machine of the right size for us. Eventually, they switched to LPARs (and eventually HMCs to configure them) and allocated the resources we needed. Both companies were great to work with. Keep in mind-- they might give you more resources than you contracted for during a test. But during a disaster declaration, you get what's on the paper. No more. And if there's a lot of disaster going around, you may be bumped from a scheduled test so someone with a real disaster can use the equipment. And when a hurricane is bearing down on Florida, a lot of companies declare a pre-emptive disaster just in case. So plan the timing of your disasters carefully!

Plans 1 & 2 were "grab the tapes and run." It all depends on how fast you need to recover. Our mission statement for recovery said 48 hours to have the machine up and running with all applications. Since all applications were intertwined, there was no point in trying to recover 1 application over another.

Communications are another big piece of the recovery. Waking up the recovery machine is one thing; being able to talk to it is another!

One more piece is open office space where a flock of PCs can land and provide space for people to show up and run the business. I'm not sure if we still have a contract for office space or not.

3) When we migrated our machine to the V7000 we built a similar system about 15 miles away in Cincinnati. We have our own equipment in locked racks. The two V7000 talk to each other using Metro Mirror with Change Volumes. Should a disaster strike, we fire up the backup copy. We can make a flash copy of the DR system. We wake up the flash copy to prove the data is really there and that we can actually run on that system. Both sites have been upgraded to V9000s, and the DR site is a copy of the production site; we have 2 mostly identical systems.

Choosing a location for a hot site: a) someplace not in the same power grid as the primary site. SunGard had massive generators at both facilities we used, capable of keeping things running for days without grid power. Our current hot site has generators as well. b) someplace not likely to be hit by the same natural disaster as the primary site. All of our hot site locations have been far enough away that it would take one -massive- storm to take out both facilities!

One question that no one thinks about-- if the disaster is more than just your building or computer room-- if the community is affected as well-- who will actually take your tapes to the hot site and load them in; who will actually go to or move to the city with the open office space just to keep your company running when they're trying to get a roof back on their house or pump out the basement or find out where their house has been moved to or to see if there's anything to salvage from the ashes.

Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Brian
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2018 8:16 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: IBM i Hosting - Disaster Recovery

Hello All,

I'm interested in recommendations or contact from companies that can
provide IBM i hosting options, specifically for disaster recovery. 
We've got our own primary system that I anticipate we'll be upgrading
and continuing to use in a production mode. What we're looking for is a
company that could work with us to provide hosting for DR purposes.  We
can work out the specifics of how we get our backups to the DR site and
so on once the conversation starts.

For now I'm just looking for some references / recommendation on good
companies that could provide such a service that I could talk with.

You can contact me on or off list, whichever is appropriate.

Thank you,
Brian