Recovering an IMS system using the IMS Recovery Expert disaster recovery feature

In case of a disaster that renders an IMS system unusable, you can restore the system at a remote site if you have implemented the disaster recovery feature of IMS Recovery Expert.

IMS Recovery Expert allows you to configure your disaster recovery strategy to restore from IMS image copies or System Level Backups.

IMS relies on the logs and the RECON data sets to track data changes. The log tracks the actual changes, while the RECON keeps information about the archive and active log data sets known to IMS. The log data sets and RECON are essential to recovery.

In preparation for a potential disaster, you can use IMS Recovery Expert to build jobs in the disaster recovery PDS to recover these critical data sets. In addition, you can use IMS Recovery Expert to perform System Level Backups and ensure that the backups are offloaded to tape. The tapes containing the System Level Backup, the disaster recovery PDS, and all data sets required for recovery should be shipped to the recovery site.

To ensure an accurate recovery, you need to build a disaster recovery profile and ensure that the jobs produced from the profile are executed on a regular basis.

IMS Recovery Expert makes it easy to build a disaster recovery (DR) profile because you do not have to know the names of the logs and RECON data sets.

Disaster recovery profiles can be renamed, viewed, and deleted in the same way as job profiles.