Preparing for disaster recovery

How to plan ahead for Disaster Recovery (DR) with IBM® z/OS Connect.

About this task

A major part of Disaster Recovery (DR) is planning ahead and being prepared. Having a DR solution prevents or minimizes data loss and business disruption for both partial and complete site failures. High Availability eliminates a single point of failure. Red Hat® OpenShift® clusters are both highly available and able to perform basic disaster recovery procedures. The guidance for recovery assumes that you don't manually modify the installation of the products or the API image and Custom Resources on the cluster.

A z/OS Connect server is stateless and does not require backup. For that reason, no integrated solution is included. Customers are responsible for storing source and artifacts in appropriate repositories. For more information about storing z/OS Connect API projects, see Checking your z/OS Connect API project into source control. For more information about disaster recovery, see Understanding disaster recovery.

Important: It is recommended to complete disaster recovery preparation steps before a disaster.

Procedure

  1. Create and configure a DR Red Hat OpenShift cluster that is identical to a Red Hat OpenShift production cluster. As part of this, ensure that the DR cluster has the IBM z/OS Connect Operator, ZosConnect Custom Resource (CR) instance and other resources such as Secrets and ConfigMaps configured and deployed. The DR cluster configuration should be identical to the production cluster. For more information, see Install the z/OS Connect server image.
  2. Configure connections on the DR Red Hat OpenShift cluster as for the API projects. For more information, see Configuring the z/OS Connect server.
  3. Configure security for z/OS Connect on the Red Hat OpenShift DR cluster. For more information, see Overview of IBM z/OS Connect security.
  4. Store the latest version of your API image in a Container Registry that is accessible from the DR cluster. For more information, see Invoke z/OS Connect APIs.