Information Systems:Exploring transactional backups for our IBM i (Bart)

Overview

It is well understood that the value of our current backup strategy (which consists of nightly full system saves to tape) is severely undermined by the fact that all system/user activity after the backup (i.e. throughout the entire next day) is not backed up and thus prone to complete loss during a system outage. On the other hand, all exploration of potential high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions to date have centered around a second, fully operational IBM i, which, gauging merely by the inaction with past endeavors, should indicate that such a solution is outside of the company's interests (primarily because of cost). Thus the goal of this endeavor is to develop a "customized" solution based on third-party software that avoids owning a second machine as a requirement, yet still achieves a lower recovery point objective (RPO) than our current strategy.

Considerations

It is worthy to first note the assumptions of this exploration:

• High-availability i.e. having a second machine ready to fail over to and serve users when the primary system is down, is of less interest to the company because a) the cost required of owning and licensing a second machine and b) the reality that any disaster impairing the system beyond immediate serviceability/repair is likely to equally affect company operation on other fronts (i.e. the case of a natural disaster affecting building infrastructure (warehouse inventory), network connectivity to the outside world, logistics (shipping routes) etc.). In other words, business continuity planning that provides redundancy only for the critical machine but not other parts of the business (i.e. ability to fulfill orders) does not make sense.

• Bandwidth constraints limit any strategies that involve a full system backup over the network every night. Such solutions (i.e. Amazon S3/Glacier for x86) do not seem to be prevalent for the IBM i architecture anyhow

• Full system saves to tape