This IBM® Redbooks® publication presents an overview of the IBM Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ (IBM GDPS®) family of offerings and the role they play in delivering a business IT resilience solution.

The book begins with a discussion of general concepts of business IT resilience and disaster recovery, along with issues related to high application availability, data integrity, and performance. These topics are considered within the framework of government regulation, increasing application and infrastructure complexity, and the competitive and rapidly changing modern business environment.

Next, it describes the GDPS family of offerings with specific reference to how they can help you achieve your defined goals for disaster recover and high availability. Also covered are the features that simplify and enhance data replication activities, the prerequisites for implementing each offering, and hints for planning for the future and immediate business requirements. Tables provide easy-to-use summaries and comparisons of the offerings, and the additional planning and implementation services available from IBM are explained.

Finally, a number of practical client scenarios and requirements are described, along with the most suitable GDPS solution for each case.

The introductory chapters of this publication are intended for a broad technical audience including IT System Architects, Availability Managers, Technical IT Managers, Operations Managers, System Programmers, and Disaster Recovery Planners. The subsequent chapters provide more technical details about the GDPS offerings, and each can be read in isolation for those who are interested. Because of this, if you do read all the chapters, be aware that some information is repeated.

This book was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center.

Frank Kyne is an Executive IT Specialist at the International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center. He has been an author of a number of Parallel Sysplex Redbooks documents. Before joining the ITSO, Frank worked in IBM Services in Ireland as an MVS™ Systems Programmer.

David Clitherow is a Consulting I/T Specialist with IBM Global Technology Services® in the UK. He has more than 25 years of experience in IBM working directly with clients primarily focused on the mainframe platform. For the last five years, he has been working with one of the world’s largest financial services clients in a number of roles, most recently as a Client IT Architect. Dave is a member of the GDPS development team, the GDPS Customer Design Council, and a core team member of the IBM High Availability Community of Practice.

Sim Schindel is an Executive IT Specialist with over 24 years in IBM and more than 30 years of experience in IT, working with enterprise clients and systems. Her areas of expertise include Parallel Sysplex and GDPS. Sim is a member of the GDPS development team with primary responsibility for GDPS Information Development. She is a member of the IBM System z® eBusiness Leadership Council, the GDPS Customer Design Council.

The authors of the previous editions of this book were:

Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this project:

George Kozakos
IBM Australia

Thomas Bueche
IBM Germany

Nick Clayton
IBM UK

Stephen Anania
Charlie Burger
Alan McClure
David Petersen
Judy Ruby-Brown
John Sing
IBM USA

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