Re: Thoughts on this design for two Power servers across two data centers

I must I am confused why mirroring the SANs at the SAN level would be an
issue? The plan was to have the DR Power server off. Then the SANs would
replicate the data in real time and that data would always be application
data. If there was a failure in the primary DC, then why would the DR Power
9 fail IPL when the boot volumes content hasn't changed? That's how we do
it on the mainframe but then Z mainframes connected to DS8K's are not quite
the same as Power servers connected to V5020 SANs.

As for maintenance etc. could we do that one LPAR designated for test/dev
and not replicate the volumes they are on. Then when we were happy with the
changes, copy them to the production LPAR (during a planned outage) and
then test. SInce we were in a planned outage, we could temporarily
shutdown replication since no new data is being created,

The VTL is for local tape backup. The LTO is for offsite backup in another
city. This is critical financial data so backups on two VTL's is not enough
for archiving.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 3:01 AM DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I would add IBM PowerHA to manage the mirroring parts of the SANs. If
you use the mirroring 'bare' then you're replicating the entire
partition and as such if you need to flip to the backup you guarantee an
abnormal IPL. You also lose the ability to do maintenance activities on
one system (Upgrades, full saves, PTFs) while you're running on the
other system.

One other comment. With VTL do you still need LTO? Each DSI unit can
replicate to the other so you get offsite backups that way.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 12/11/2019 4:33 PM, Laurence Chiu wrote:

Looking to deploy new Power servers across two data centers to support
application that is low volume but mission critical and high financial
value.

I am using the following design guidelines.

1. Both servers use SAN no disks. Total 5TB max
2. Data is encrypted at rest
3. Data is replicated in real time across the two sites
4. Backup to VTL
5. Off-site backups to LTO tape

So the kit would be

1. Two Power 9 servers 16GB FC
2. HMC
3. IBM Storwize V5000 using its encryption and mirroring software
5. DSI IDSI520-D04 VTL
6. LTO7

This is for an Enterprise that already has mainframes and DS8K SANs with
SKLM supporting encryption so it's not over cooking it

Thanks

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