Implementation Services for Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters

Combining IBM services expertise and Symantec software, IBM Implementation Services for Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters (GDOC) provides automation, testing and management to support world-class high availability and near-transparent application recovery for open systems.

Automates application recovery across remote mirrored sites

Accommodates heterogeneous, open-system environments

Enables regular recovery testing

Provides guidance and support across the full course of the implementation

Capitalises on IBM’s knowledge and experience in designing and implementing multi-data centre, high-availability solutions

GDOC is designed to protect the availability of critical applications running in mixed environments that include IBM AIX^®-based servers as well as servers based on HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Linux^™? or Microsoft^® Windows^® operating systems. This multivendor solution, which is based on an open systems cluster architecture, provides disaster recovery for data mirrored across two or more sites. A solution typically starts with a cluster of servers at a single site managed by Symantec software to provide high availability. This solution is extended by adding mirrored copies of the data, along with additional servers, at a second, geographically distant site, synchronising the data between the two sites using one or more data replication solutions.

This solution helps enable an organisation to recover from an outage quickly with minimal data loss. Recovery time is typically reduced when compared to that associated with traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Symantec Software Veritas Cluster Server automates recovery from an outage both within a site and across sites and enables regular recovery testing. By reducing manual recovery processes, organisations can greatly increase their ability to survive a local or regional outage. If an outage does occur within the server environment, automated recovery processes take over to accelerate recovery time, minimise human error and re-enable the environment until IT staff are available.