Monday, March 19, 2007

IBM GDPS V3.4: Enterprise-wide disaster recovery

Last week (March 13, 2007) IBM announced its Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex V3.4 with GA on March 30, 2007. And as the title suggests, IBM wants to stretch GDPS in order to secure an enterprise-wide disaster recovery. This should also include 'open systems'. The announcement says : "IBM is also announcing Implementation Services for Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters (GDOC) to provide automation, testing, and management capabilities to support world-class high availability and near-transparent application recovery for open systems". This is called Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters (GDOC). As a matter of fact, this looks like a very promising evolution in the GDPS story. You can read more about GDOC in the announcement letter and in another one that was already published last year : "IBM Implementation Services for Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters".
Other highlghts of this new release :
  • Management of Linux images and data, when Linux is running native on a System z server, not limited to Linux images running as a z/VM guest.
  • Enhanced availability for a three-site GDPS Metro/Global Mirror configuration for various disaster and recovery environments.
  • Enhanced GDPS/PPRC system management with a graphical user interface.
  • New GDPS health checks for the z/OS HealthChecker to check for GDPS "best practices."
  • More flexibility with additional automation for IPL messages.

You can find additional information on the IBM GDPS page and there's a very nice white paper called "GDPS: The e-business Availability Solution". This white paper has been reworked and contains already information on V3.4. But it's really a very readable introduction to GDPS and its functionalities.

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