QDXi Best Backup Practice(s)

[Rob Galino]

Just a question for the general QDX Integrator (aka Cloverleaf) community, what are you doing for backups for your integration engines along the lines of disaster recovery?

I know for most, if money was not an issue, everyone would have an HA environment, i.e. a clustered server, redundant fault tolerant everything with unlimited disk space with an active geographically separated “hot” DR mirrored site, in which case a backup would be a due diligence kind of thing – a matter of good practice…  One can wish!

In reality, here at Hawaii Pacific Health, QDXi is on a p630, in a non-clustered environment, single server DLPAR’d (AIX dynamic logical partitioned) which allows us to have two (2) environments, Prod and Test on a single server…  For backups, a savevg is done daily and a mksysb monthly on a local tape backup for the production LPAR, test is backed up periodically but not as frequent as prod.  In addtion, we have HP DataProtector doing a daily snap of the production LPAR storing images on near-line storage (tape).  Daily tapes are stored off site…  Also, we are in the process of building a DR site…

The tapes come into play if we had a total loss of the primary site or disk, we can recover by booting from a mksysb, if neede, then restore using the savevg or DataProtector snap, whichever is current…  We haven’t had to go this extreme yet but wanted to know what everyone is doing in general or out of the ordinary for backups…  

Aloha,

– Rob  😆

Robert M. Galino

Business Systems Analyst, Systems Integration

Hawaii Pacific Health Information Systems

Topic

[Glenn Friedenreich]

Hi Rob – We use the AIX utility ‘rdist’ (see ‘man rdist’) in a ksh script to keep a remotely-located Disaster Recovery system synchronized with our Cloverleaf production machine for the key Cloverleaf directories.  The synchronization script runs twice per day via root-level cron.   The script is set up to skip the directories which have active locked files (smat, database).  Every 6 months we request a temporary license key from Quovadx and do a disaster-recovery drill at the remote site with selected interfaced systems.  Both our primary and remote systems are running AIX 5.1, HACMP, Cloverleaf 5.3.  We’ve found the rdist utility to be an easy way to automate this process.  (The disaster-recovery synchronization is in addition to our normal production tape backups, which are rotated off site.)

-Glenn

Glenn Friedenreich

Christiana Care Health System

Wilmington, DE

[Author]

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