Your data is important to your business and crucial to your ability to manage day-to-day operations and address security concerns.

Having a strategy on how to protect your data and make sure you do not suffer any downtime is critical, and having diversity in the geography of where your data sits is a huge step forward to address these concerns.

High availability vs. disaster recovery

IBM Db2 on Cloud‘s High Availability (HA) Plan offers Db2’s HADR SYNC and ASYNC node technology to deliver superior availability and reliability, all within the same region. When required, failover to the HA nodes is managed seamlessly and automatically by IBM using automatic client reroute (ACR). HA plans reside within a multi-zone region (MZR) or single-zone region (SZR).

With the introduction of Geo-Replicated Disaster Recovery nodes, users are now able to extend that availability to an entirely different region by adding an on-demand Disaster Recovery node. This ensures that users can still access their data in the unlikely event of an outage in their Primary region (e.g., Primary instance: Dallas, DR node: London).

What are Disaster Recovery nodes?

With Geo-Replicated Disaster Recovery nodes, users are able to add a Disaster Recovery node in a different region on-demand. In the rare case of a region outage due to unforeseen circumstances, customers are now able to shift their workload to a different region, provided they have an existing Disaster Recovery node.

While HA plans deliver reliability within the same region, Disaster Recovery extends that reliability to an entirely different region. The Disaster Recovery site can be used by customers to continue their business operations while their Primary site is being brought back online. Customers can then revert back to their Primary site with a few clicks.

Highlights

• Users can add a Disaster Recovery (DR) Node in a data center of their choice on-demand.
• In addition to failover functionality, the DR node also allows “read-on-standby” and improves read-availability.
• Users must initiate the failover. This process can be automated with the API that is provided with HADR functions.
• Users can failover to the DR Node and fail back to the Primary node with a few clicks.
• Using both an HA plan plus an offsite HADR geo-replicated node is the ideal option for maximum uptime. Please note that “HADR” is not the same as “HA.”
• Currently available on HA plans only.

Data center release schedule

• March 9, 2021: Toronto, Montreal
• March 15, 2021: Amsterdam, Milan, São Paulo
• March 17, 2021: Washington (us-East), London (eu-Gb)
• March 22, 2021: Sydney (au-Syd), Tokyo (jp-Tok)
• March 24, 2021: Frankfurt (eu-De), Dallas (us-South)

How to get started

If you are already a Db2 on Cloud user, follow these instructions:

1. Go to your console. Click on the Administrator Tab on the left.
2. You’ll now see a Disaster Recovery tab. 
3. Select a data center from the list. Service Instance is automatically populated.
4. Once you pick your desired data center, click on Enable Disaster Recovery.
5. Once this is complete, select Promote; this will launch your DR console.
6. In your DR console, click Promote.
7. You will now see a notification confirming you have promoted.

For a guided tour of the steps above please click here.

If you are currently not a Db2 on Cloud user, click here to order Db2 on Cloud via IBM Cloud, or speak to your IBM sales representative. You can also learn about Db2 on Cloud using our tutorials via Digital Technical Engagement or read the docs.