Configuring Data Foundation for Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) is the ability to recover and continue business critical applications from natural or human created disasters. It is a component of the overall business continuance strategy of any major organization as designed to preserve the continuity of business operations during major adverse events.

The Fusion Data Foundation Disaster Recovery (DR) capability enables DR across multiple Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters, and is categorized as follows:
  • Metro-DR

    Metro-DR ensures business continuity during the unavailability of a data center with no data loss. In the public cloud these would be similar to protecting from an Availability Zone failure.

  • Regional-DR

    Regional-DR ensures business continuity during the unavailability of a geographical region, accepting some loss of data in a predictable amount. In the public cloud this would be similar to protecting from a region failure.

  • Disaster Recovery with stretch cluster

    Stretch cluster solution ensures business continuity with no-data loss disaster recovery protection with OpenShift Data Foundation based synchronous replication in a single OpenShift cluster, stretched across two data centers with low latency and one arbiter node.

Zone failure in Metro-DR and region failure in Regional-DR is usually expressed using the terms, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
  • RPO is a measure of how frequently you take backups or snapshots of persistent data. In practice, the RPO indicates the amount of data that will be lost or need to be reentered after an outage.
  • RTO is the amount of downtime a business can tolerate. The RTO answers the question, “How long can it take for our system to recover after we are notified of a business disruption?”

The intent of this guide is to detail the Disaster Recovery steps and commands necessary to be able to failover an application from one OpenShift Container Platform cluster to another and then relocate the same application to the original primary cluster.

Deploying your disaster recovery solution

To protect your applications for disaster recovery (DR), deploy the your DR solution as follows in the order mentioned here.
  1. Deploy and configure IBM Fusion Data Foundation 4.16 Metro-DR or Regional-DR solution. For details, see Metro-DR solution for Fusion Data Foundation or Regional-DR solution for Fusion Data Foundation
  2. Deploy IBM Fusion 2.8.x, as detailed in Deploying IBM Fusion

The IBM Metro- & Regional- Disaster Recovery instructions helps you to configure your infrastructure in order to failover an application from one OpenShift Container Platform cluster to another and then failback the same application to the original primary cluster. After securing your application, deploy Fusion as per the instructions given in step 2.