Multi-region cold standby disaster recovery for IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps

Multi-region cold standby disaster recovery (DR) enables the restoration of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment if an unrecoverable failure impacts the deployment or its hosting cluster, data center, or region.

Overview

The multi-region cold standby disaster recovery solution for IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps uses IBM Storage Fusion to create and restore backups of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment and its data. For more information about IBM Storage Fusion, see the Fusion documentation Opens in a new tab.

IBM Storage Fusion uses the concept of a hub and spoke. A Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform cluster that has an IBM Storage Fusion backup & restore service installation on it is the hub cluster. The hub manages the backups, and backups can also be taken or restored on a hub cluster. A Red Hat OpenShift cluster that has an IBM Storage Fusion backup & restore agent installation on it is a spoke cluster. Backups can be taken or restored on a spoke, but the spoke cannot manage the backups.

IBM Storage Fusion takes a backup of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment, and stores it in external object storage. If a problem occurs that renders your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment unusable, then the backup can be restored to a Red Hat OpenShift spoke cluster. The entire IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment is restored, along with its data.

Entitlement to IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps provides you with entitlement to the IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation service in internal deployment mode only. To implement multi-region cold standby disaster recovery for IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps, you must purchase a full IBM Storage Fusion license for access to the backup and disaster recovery features. For more information, see the license terms.

Restrictions

  • IBM Storage Fusion and the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment to be backed up must be installed on the same Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
  • The backup and restore procedures cannot be used on offline (air gapped) deployments of IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps.
  • The backup and restore procedures cannot be used if IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps is installed with Infrastructure Automation.
  • The backup and restore procedures cannot be used on AllNamespace deployments of IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps. For more information about installation modes, see Operator installation mode.
  • If IBM Cognos® Analytics is installed, it is not backed up or recovered.

Before you begin

Red Hat OpenShift

Ensure that you meet the following prerequisites for the hub cluster, and also for the spoke cluster if you are using one:

  • The Red Hat OpenShift version is supported by IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps and IBM Storage Fusion v2.7.2 or v2.8.x.
  • The Red Hat OpenShift command-line interface (oc) is installed. For more information, see the instructions in Getting started with the Red Hat OpenShift CLI Opens in a new tab in the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.
  • You are logged in to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster with oc login for any steps that use the Red Hat OpenShift command-line interface (CLI).

Storage

Ensure that you meet the following prerequisites for your persistent and external storage.

  • In addition to your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment's persistent storage, you must have external object storage available for IBM Storage Fusion to use as the backup storage location. This is where the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps volume backups will be stored. This can be any S3 compatible storage, or Microsoft® Azure Blob Storage.
  • The amount of external object storage that is required is affected by the amount of data to be stored, the change rate of the data, and the storage efficiencies that can be made from compression and deduplication. As a guide, for a 30-day retention period, you must have object storage capacity equivalent to a minimum of 125% of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment's persistent storage. For example, if you have 100 GB of persistent storage for IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps, then you must have 125 GB of object storage available for backups.
  • The persistent storage that IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps uses must be Container Storage Interface (CSI) compatible, and must support volume snapshot and restore. The CSI driver must be v1 or higher. Backup and restore using IBM Storage Fusion does not work if you have Portworx as your storage provider, this is a known issue in IBM Storage Fusion.
  • PersistentVolumes (PVs) must be created with volumeMode set to Filesystem.
  • The storage class that is used by IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps for distributed storage must have volumeBindingMode set to Immediate or WaitForFirstConsumer, and allowVolumeExpansion must be set to true.

For more information, see the Backup & Restore section in System requirements Opens in a new tab in the IBM Storage Fusion documentation.

Backup and restore procedures

Use the instructions in the following sections to backup or restore an IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment.