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

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A Metro Global Mirror Failover/Failback with Practice session combines Metro Mirror, Global Mirror and FlashCopy® across three sites to provide a point-in-time copy of the data on the third site. You can use this to practice what you might do if a disaster occurred without losing your disaster recovery capability.

Before you begin

Note: This function is available on DS8000® storage systems.

About this task

The intermediate volume is on the third site (I3). This maintains disaster recovery capability while a copy is kept on the H3 volume for practice purposes.

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

Procedure

  1. Start a Metro Global Mirror with Practice session.
  2. When the session reaches the Prepared state, issue a Flash command to take a point-in-time copy of the data that is on I3, on H3. This creates a consistent point-in-time copy of your data on the H3 volume, and then automatically restarts the session so that copying from H1 to H2 to I3 continues. The Flash command temporarily stops copying the data from site 2 to site 3, in order to create a consistent point-in-time copy on I3, while maintaining disaster recovery capabilities on site 2 using the Metro Mirror portion of the session. Then, data replication from H2 to I3 is restarted.
  3. Practice the same actions you would take in an actual disaster, using H3 as your practice host volume, while you run the real application on H1. This enables you to use the same scripts and commands to run on H3 that you would use in an actual disaster.