BC/DR Methodologies

Contact Mt Xia for assistance with your Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and High Availability planning and implementation projects at 615.556.0456 or dfrench@mtxia.com Current:BC/DR Methodologies Previous: Home Page Policies Guidelines Standards Procedures

Special Interest Topics:

• Consolidated view of policies, guidelines, standards and procedures
• Automated Microcode Management System for RS/6000, pSeries, AIX
• Off-site Datacenter - High Availability / Disaster Recovery Facilities

During a Disaster Recovery (DR) implementation effort, the last thing you want is unexpected hardware and software configuration issues. These tend to consume time, resources, and cause Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to be missed. In order to ensure business continuity, organizations must design, implement, maintain and enforce policies, procedures, standards, and guidelines that encompass all aspects of their critical business functions.

A successful DR effort is not only dependent upon a well thought-out DR plan; it must have been derived from an enterprise wide mentality of business continuity. Furthermore, business continuity must be the beginning point in systems design, not the ending point. Unfortunately, very few systems are built starting from the business continuity perspective and working backwards.

The documentation referenced here describes the policies, guidelines, standards and procedures for insuring business continuity for the business functions supported using IBM's Power 5 architecture. This architecture supports the ability to provide capacity on-demand and virtual I/O. The ability to micro-partition using pieces of a processor and dynamically allocate and deallocate memory is supported in this environment as well.

The Power 5 architecture provides the ability to define LPAR's and Virtual LPAR's. The difference between an LPAR and a Virtual LPAR is the implementation of the virtualization features. The Power 5 architecture allows the sytem administrator to configure logical partitions with dedicated resources such as processors, memory, and I/O adapters. The system administrator may also configure logical partitions utilizing shared processors, memory, and virtualized I/O adapters. The virtual I/O adapters are configured and made available to the LPAR's via the VIO server. The VIO server provides the ability to reduce the number of adapters required to support multiple LPAR's by virtualizing the hardware and allowing multiple LPAR's to share the same hardware I/O adapters.

Additional documents of interest

Successful Business Continuity - Part 1 - Users and Groups

This article was published in the April 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses system administration needs and requirements oriented around users and groups. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters, such as user names, group names, UID and GID numbers.

Successful Business Continuity - Part 2 - Machine and Host Names

This article was published in the May 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for machines, systems, adapters, and aliases. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.

Successful Business Continuity - Part 3 - Volume Names

This article was published in the December 2005 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses naming structures for volume groups, logical volumes, log logical volumes, directory mount points, etc. The overall emphasis of this series of articles is for implementation of enterprise wide unique identifiers for a variety of parameters.

Successful Business Continuity - Part 4 - MQ Series, Startup/Shutdown Scripts, Error Processing

This article was published in the April 2006 issue of AIX Update magazine and discusses how to implement AIX in an environment dedicated to business continuity. The topic of this article is the assignment of MQ Series queue names and aliases, resource group startup and shutdown script names (Application startup/shutdown script names), error logging, and error notification.

Automated Microcode Management System

One of the most difficult administration tasks in an AIX environment is attempting to keep the firmware and microcode up-to-date. Mt Xia has devised an automated method of gathering the Microcode information, determining which microcode needs to be updated, generating reports, and uploading the required microcode updates to each individual system.

Calculating the size of a Virtual Processor

This document describes the algorithms used to calculate the size of a virtual processor when using shared processors in an LPAR. The IBM documentation describes how to calculate CPU utilization, NOT how to size for configuration, this document clarifies this process. A description of the HMC input fields for the processor tab is included.

Basics of Partition Load Manager Setup

This presentation was provided by Ron Barker from IBM regarding the PLM Basic setup.

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