Types of Disaster Recovery Solutions for IBM Sterling Order Management Customers
Having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is an important part of a strong business continuity strategy. Disasters can occur at any time and if the system is not properly protected, they can have a major impact on your organization. Disaster Recovery is the process of restoring your production environment from backups that were taken in the event of a data center outage. There are different approaches to disaster recovery, and each one offers varying benefits. For example, a backup solution can be used to recover from hardware failure or human error. Backups can also be used to recover from a natural disaster. The most common way to implement disaster recovery is through disk replication. A snapshot of the production environment is created and stored in a secondary data center. When the primary site goes down, this snapshot is restored at the secondary data center to restore the production environment. This approach provides the best return on investment for IBM Sterling Order Management customers, because it can reduce the cost of a failover and the risk of downtime.
A disaster recovery solution that replicates data from a primary site to a secondary site is called a Disaster Recovery Appliance. There are two types of Disaster Recovery Appliances – a virtual Disaster Recovery Appliance (VDA) and an on-premises VMware-based Disaster Recovery Appliance. A VDA is a virtual machine that runs on a VMware hypervisor and is deployed on an offsite location. It is connected to the primary production site over a high-speed network connection. The work of the primary queue manager on the main appliance is replicated to a secondary instance on the remote site, either asynchronously or synchronously. The secondary queue manager processes application messages until such time as normal operation can be resumed.
An on-premises Disaster Recovery Appliance is an appliance that runs on a physical server, located in a separate data center. The work of the primary queue manager on a VDA is replicated to a secondary instance on a distant appliance, either asynchronously or synchronously. There can be up to 4 MB of work in the TCP send buffer of the primary queue manager, and this can be lost during a disaster. The secondary queue manager at the distant site can be started manually, and applications can reconnect to it using automatic client reconnection.
A bank in Asia required a disaster recovery solution that could provide business continuity, meet RTO and RPO requirements, and fit within budget constraints. They chose to implement the IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery managed service solution, which enables them to improve recovery point objectives and reduce RTO times. They can now implement a simple failover and test their disaster recovery plans regularly without disrupting business operations. IBM Sterling Order Management customers with specific business continuity and recovery needs should consult directly with their representative to understand what mitigation or recovery actions are available for them. For example, IBM clients can purchase options that improve their Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives from the standard of 4 hours. ibm disaster recovery