Practicing disaster recovery for a Global Mirror Failover/Failback with Practice session

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A Global Mirror Failover and Failback with Practice combines Global Mirror and FlashCopy® to provide a point-in-time copy of the data on a remote site at a distance over 300 km away from your first site. You can use this to practice what you might do if a disaster occurred.

Before you begin

You can do this practice without losing your disaster recovery capability. The number of volumes used for the device varies, but the steps to conduct a Global Mirror Failover and Failback with Practice are the same for both devices.

This function is available on the following storage systems:
  • IBM® DS8000®
  • Systems running IBM Spectrum® Virtualize

About this task

Perform these steps to practice disaster recover actions for a Global Mirror Failover/Failback with Practice session:

Procedure

  1. Start a Global Mirror with Practice session.
  2. When the session reaches the Prepared state, issue a Flash command to restore consistent data on I2 and make a point-in-time copy of the data on H2. This creates a consistent point-in-time copy of your data on the H2 volume and then restarts the session so the copying from H1 to I2 continues. This temporarily stops copying of the data from site 1 to site 2, and creates a consistent point-in-time copy. The data replication from H1 to I2 is then restarted.
  3. Practice the same actions you would take in an actual disaster, using H2 as your new host volume, while running the real application on H1.