Redbook : GDPS Family

I still find this blogging business a bit strange. Last month I was a bit worried because I didn't have much to post. But then again, I didn't want to post just for the sake of it. But see, this week, I made as many posts as last month. Apparently my blogging just reflects the real world. Sometimes just nothing happens and then all of a sudden everything comes together. It's like having nothing to do for ages and then you get three invitations all for the same date. Synchronicity ? Now . . . back to business.

The Redbooks Newsletter is a great source to stay up to date with the redbook publications for your specific interest areas. You can subscribe over here. Though it's not a new one, the redbook that caught my attention this time is 'GDPS Family : An Introduction to Concepts and Capabilities'. This is a 180p. introduction to GDPS in its various forms. I guess the Table of Contents gives you a good idea of what's being discussed. Overall,

• Chapter 1. Introduction to Business Resilience and the role of GDPS
• Chapter 2. Service Availability technologies
  Explanation of the underlying technology such as Parallel Sysplex, copy technologies, synchronous vs asynchronous, Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives . . .
  
• Chapter 3. GDPS/PPRC
  Protecting data integrity, Active/Active and Active/Standby discussion, Freeze Policies, Open LUN support, Management with lots of examples
  
• Chapter 4. GDPS/PPRC HyperSwap Manager
• Chapter 5. GDPS/XRC
• Chapter 6. GDPS/Global Mirror
• Chapter 7. Combining Local/Metro HA with out-of-region DR
• Chapter 8. RCMF/PPRC
  This was unknown to me : it offers "a small subset of the function provided by GDPS/PPRC and GDPS/PPRC HM, providing just the ability to manage your remote copy configuration using a set of NetView panels. It is not a disaster recovery offering because it does not include the Freeze function and therefore cannot guarantee consistency across multiple LSSs". It may be a first step towards the implementation of "full GDPS/PPRC or GDPS/PPRC HM in the future".
  
• Chapter 9. RCMF/XRC
• Chapter 10. Sample continuous availability and disaster recovery scenarios
  Some case studies going covering single site solutions and various two data center solutions.