The purpose of this blog is to highlight the need to recovery from unexpected downtime and steps to help you.
Disclaimer”: iSeries and AS400 are servers. IBM I is an operating system. I use these terms interchangeably to make it easy for folks to find this kind of information on the web.
Major Disasters Emphasize Need For Backup…AND Recovery
Disasters like Hurricane Harvey (or Irma) emphasize the need for backup and recovery.
Having knowledgeable people and good procedures are two important parts of a recovery.
But…
Where are the backup tapes?
Which tapes should be used?
What gets saved on what backup?
Where are the Disaster Recovery procedures?
What order do we use the tapes in?
If there are replicated systems, has a role swap already been performed?
Where are the replicated systems?
If your company was hit by a disaster could you last over 2 weeks before you were able to be back on-line? Have you thought about what you are doing to protect your environment, data, and computers? This might be a good time to look at replicating your IBM i (iSeries/AS400) system to the Cloud.
Of course, I am assuming that you are doing backups, but I have seen companies who don’t backup their machines, or they don’t back the machine up often enough. How often is often enough? It depends. Sorry, there is no answer that works for everyone. Everyone’s backup solution is different, and it should be analyzed to determine if it is meeting the needs of the company. Can you recover from this backup strategy?
Take Backup Tape Offsite
Once you have a backup, it is critical that the tape is taken off site. You don’t want to keep the backup and the backup tape in the same computer room. What would happen if the computer were to catch on fire, both the backup and the machine could be destroyed.
Better, an easy way to get your data offsite is have an IBM i cloud hosting provider that saves your backups offsite.
Need To Recover In Minutes…Not In Days? Perhaps You Need High Availability (HA)
Backups are great, but let’s talk about a small problem with backups.
Consider this scenario. Each night at midnight, you do a full backup which takes 1 hour. During the day your company is entering data, running jobs, taking phone orders, shipping, invoicing, etc. If the machine were to die at 10:00pm, then you would have lost 21 hours of data.
Oh, that isn’t good.
While you have a full backup each night, you have no backup of all the transactions that happened during the day until the next backup at midnight.
That is where replication and High Availability (HA) comes in. With HA, as soon as one transaction is entered on your system it is immediately sent to a hosted target server. This means you don’t have the problem of losing your transactions since the last backup. You can even perform target side backups on the hosted target so you have no downtime each day on your source system.
Test Recovery … So You KNOW You Can Recover From The Unexpected
While you may have a solid backup strategy in place, when was the last time you tested your recovery.
If you haven’t tested your recovery you have no idea if you actually can recover.
IBM reports 75% of all businesses with recovery plans do not conduct regular recovery testing.
But even if things go as planned, how realistic is the plan? Industry studies document that when downtime strikes, 33% of all recoveries do not go as planned.
Clearly, it is best to test your recovery plan before your company needs to depend on it.
Do this yourself or work with an IBM i recovery expert. Collect your quarterly backups, your daily tapes and see if you can recover. Discover what you might be missing. Determine any issues that you have now so that you can fix and correct them while it’s a test.
Do you want to tell the owners of your company that you “thought” you had good backups? If it isn’t backed up you can’t recover it. If you don’t have the latest copy, you can’t give them the correct data. If you aren’t replicating, then you have to understand you will only be able to recover up to the last backup that you performed.
Summary – Backup And Test Your Recovery Plan
In summary, backups are your first step in your recovery, but you need to test a restore to make sure you have everything you need to recover your system. Do you know if what you are writing to tape is readable? You have no idea until you try to recover it. Don’t wait until your job is on the line. The job you save might be your own!
Need Help?
Call us at 714-593-0387 or email me at blosey@source-data.com.
Leave a Reply