Planning data resiliency

Data resilience is the ability for data to be available to users or applications. You can achieve data resiliency by using IBM® i cluster technology with PowerHA® technologies or logical replication technologies.

For IBM i supported implementations of data resilience, you have several choices of technologies. When these technologies are combined with IBM i cluster resource services, you can build a complete high-availability solution. These technologies can be categorized this way:

IBM i Independent disk pool technologies

These technologies are all based on IBM i implementation of independent disk pools. For high availability that uses independent disk pool technologies, it is required that all data that needs to be resilient be stored in an independent disk pool. In many cases, this requires migrating data to independent disk pools. This information assumes that migration of data has been completed.

The following IBM i supported technologies are based on independent disk pools:
  • Switched logical units (LUNs)
  • Geographic mirroring
  • Metro Mirror
  • Global Mirror
  • HyperSwap® with independent auxiliary storage pools (IASPs)

DS8000 Full System HyperSwap technology

DS8000® Full System HyperSwap is an IBM System Storage® technology, which has been integrated into PowerHA to provide a minimal downtime high availability solution for storage outages (seconds to minutes). Full System HyperSwap can also be combined with live partition mobility to define and implement affinity between the POWER® server hosting the IBM i logical partition and the storage server hosting the data.

Logical replication technologies

Logical replication is a journal-based technology, where data is replicated to another system in real time. Logical replication technologies use IBM i cluster resource services and journaling with IBM Business Partner applications. These solutions require a high availability business partner application to configure and manage the environment. This information does not provide specific requirements for these IBM Business Partner solutions. If you are implementing a logical replication solution for high availability, consult information related to application or contact a service representative.