IBM Disaster Recovery Solutions for the iSeries (AS/400) Platform
Keeping your company up and running during a disaster is no easy task. It requires the right combination of practice and technology. Fortunately, IBM provides a variety of technologies and services that can help you ensure your iSeries (AS/400) systems are ready to handle a business disruption. Depending on the solution you choose, it can include everything from a backup and recovery strategy to a complete resiliency solution.
A key component of a robust ibm disaster recovery plan is the ability to replicate data between your primary and secondary sites. For the iSeries platform, there are two options for replication: a disk-based approach and an application-driven approach. An application-driven approach requires that the application or database be DR-ready, which can be achieved with the use of application server replicas that are synchronized to provide crash consistency. An infrastructure technology-driven approach can be implemented using a virtualization solution, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager, to reduce the amount of work required by application servers in order to achieve crash consistency.
As part of your disaster recovery strategy, you can rely on a private network to replicate and back up the information in your Production environment to your Disaster Recovery instance. This is accomplished through a high availability disaster recovery (HADR) option, which uses disk replication to maintain the data in a near-ready state. The HADR solution is a cost-effective option for organizations that want to maintain a consistent and available production environment.
To minimize the impact of a disaster, you can rely on an enterprise-grade, highly-available Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for the IBM i (AS/400) platform. This solution offers continuous and fully automated data replication and is designed to meet the service level objectives of your Production environment. It is also designed to minimize the time it takes to recover your data, and it can be used for testing purposes and for application recovery in the event of a failure.
The DR solution can also be used for disaster preparedness by using it to store a complete copy of your iSeries system configuration and runtime data. This is important because your data can only be restored if it is in a consistent state. To preserve data integrity, the DR solution provides continuous, real-time replication and a failover to the DR site. The replication is performed by a clustered server architecture that can be configured to support your Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective requirements.
To understand potential impacts on your supply chain, you can use a tool called Operations Risk Insights to assess problems and crises, whether they are natural or man-made. The tool uses data from the Global Disaster Alerting Coordination System, social media and other sources to identify the proximity and impact on suppliers located in a disaster area. It then communicates this information to IBM business leaders and suppliers through a secure email messaging system. The business leader can then take appropriate action to manage the impact to their supply chain.