For many businesses, disaster recovery is an important part of a broader resiliency strategy that can reduce risks and costs. However, planning a DR solution requires time and effort. To help reduce the risk of unforeseen expenses, IBM offers a range of managed services designed to reduce the cost and complexity of implementing an effective business continuity strategy.
The goal of a disaster recovery plan is to restore systems to the point that they are functional after a natural or man-made catastrophe. The most critical step in preparing for disaster is to determine the desired recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO refers to the amount of data that must be recovered from backups in order to recover from a disaster, while RTO refers to how fast the system needs to be restored from a failure.
Depending on the RPO and RTO, you can choose to use different types of recovery techniques. For example, you can implement a tiered approach that starts with an affordable technique and moves to more expensive options as the recovery timeframe gets shorter.
A typical ibm disaster recovery system includes several layers of redundancy to ensure the highest level of availability and recoverability. Each layer is responsible for a specific aspect of the system, such as application, web, storage, and database. The architecture also allows for quick recovery by separating the data that describes your configuration from the transactional and runtime data that is used to perform actual operations, such as orders. The disaster recovery system can be based on either a physical or virtual infrastructure and can be hosted in your own facilities, an IBM SoftLayer cloud environment, or a third-party hosting provider.
If you select an IBM SoftLayer cloud environment for your DR system, you can benefit from the world-class infrastructure and speed of recovery with rapid provisioning and failover. In addition, you can save on upfront investment with a subscription model that enables you to scale up or down capacity as needed.
IBM follows a comprehensive business continuity management (BCM) system that aligns with generally accepted industry guidelines and standards. The framework includes a set of written guidelines, roles and responsibilities, risk assessment and response, plan documentation, testing, maintenance and communication.
The Disaster Recovery Process
Your production environments are backed up frequently and stored in multiple locations to help support disaster recovery. Web and application data from your Production environments are replicated hourly to your DR instance, including file system artifacts (CSS, images and static content) and SaaS extension and infrastructure data. Backups of key environment and site data, including the database, are completed daily.
In the event of a disaster, IBM activates the disaster recovery process to switch your Pre-Production Sterling Order Management environment into your temporary Production environment and reroutes your application connections from the normal Pre-Production site to the DR site. During this time, the DR production is unavailable to your customers. Your DR environment is then restored and becomes your permanent Production environment once the disaster recovery process completes.