Protocols cluster disaster recovery

Protocols cluster disaster recovery (DR) uses the capabilities of Active File Management (AFM) based Async Disaster Recovery (AFM DR) features to provide a solution that allows an IBM Spectrum Scale™ cluster to fail over to another cluster and fail back, and backup and restore the protocol configuration information in cases where a secondary cluster is not available.

For more information on AFM-based Async DR, see AFM-based Asynchronous Disaster Recovery (AFM DR).

Important: Our initial feedback from the field suggests that success of a disaster recovery solution depends on administration discipline, including careful design, configuration and testing. Considering this, IBM® has decided to disable the Active File Management-based Asynchronous Disaster Recovery feature (AFM DR) by default and require that customers deploying the AFM DR feature first review their deployments with IBM Spectrum Scale development. You should contact IBM Spectrum Scale Support at scale@us.ibm.com to have your use case reviewed. IBM will help optimize your tuning parameters and enable the feature. Please include this message while contacting IBM Support.

These limitations do not apply to base AFM support. These apply only to Async DR available with the IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition V4.2 and V4.1.1.

For more information, see Flash (Alert): IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS™) V4.2 and V4.1.1 AFM Async DR requirement for planning.

Although an overview of the steps that need to be done is provided if performing these operations manually, it is recommended to use the mmcesdr command because it automates DR setup, failover, failback, backup, and restore actions. For more information, see mmcesdr command.