To minimize downtime and maximize availability on your i5/OS® system, you must plan for availability. Learn how to create a plan for i5/OS availability.
Before you begin your planning tasks, complete these items:
| Before you begin | |
|---|---|
| __ | Identify your current disaster recovery plan. |
| __ | Identify your current backup and recovery strategy. |
| __ | Identify the cost-per-hour of a system outage to both your business and your users. |
| i5/OS availability planning tasks | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| __ | Build an availability plan Use
the Availability
roadmap to choose the availability options that are based on your environment
and business needs. You need to plan in order to maintain availability at
the required levels during disaster recovery and server transitions. You need
to create an availability plan that addresses these options:
|
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| __ | Identify clustering requirements To
identify your clustering requirements and to build a clustering plan, see Plan for
clusters. To learn more about the availability strategies and solutions
that use clusters, see the System i® High
Availability and Clusters Note: Minimum memory requirements increase
when you cluster IBM® eServer™ i5 servers.
Pay special attention to these requirements if you plan to use clusters to
boost availability.
|
||
| __ | Identify independent disk pools
strategy To understand how independent disk pools and switchable
disk units fit into your availability strategy, see Independent disk pools. IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services |
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| __ | Identify Electronic Service Agent™ options The IBM Electronic Service Agent helps you achieve higher availability by detecting errors and transmitting them to the support center before a failure occurs (in most cases). Skilled technicians review the problem details and inventory information. The support center can then send a service representative to your site to replace the failing hardware before a system outage occurs. For more information, see Electronic Service Agent. |
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| __ | Build a backup and recovery
strategy To plan and build a backup and recovery strategy that is customized for your computing environment, seePlan a backup and recovery strategy. |
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| __ | Learn more about high availability To
learn more about availability strategies and solutions, see the Data
Resilience Solutions for IBMi5/OS High
Availability Clusters |
||
| __ | Estimate the level of availability
that you need in your business environment See Availability to learn more about System i5® high availability concepts and solutions. Find the information that you need to build a complete availability plan. |
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Web site and 
redbook. When you have completed these tasks, you should have a plan for availability that identifies these elements.
| After you finish | |
|---|---|
| __ | Record a complete availability strategy for a single server or multiple server environment. |
| __ | Record a complete strategy for backing up your server. |
| __ | Record a complete strategy for server recovery. |
| __ | Highlight any unique cluster considerations for the new release, if applicable. |
| __ | Record a complete and validated plan for cluster configuration, if applicable. |
| __ | Ensure that the hardware requirements for your cluster configuration have been met, if applicable. |
| __ | Record a complete strategy for cluster communications that highlights any key considerations, such as OptiConnect, if applicable. |
| __ | Record a complete strategy for data protection that includes solutions such as mirroring, concurrent maintenance, and RAID. Include detailed configuration and placement information for disk subsystem components. |