Overview of Application recovery

This topic provides a brief overview of application recovery, discusses some considerations to keep in mind as you read this topic, and summarizes the process of using the Recovery Manager (RMGR) functions and utilities within your application recovery strategy.

This topic contains the following information:

Before you start

Before you start with the application recovery process, RMGR should be installed, customized, and configured, and you should have a general understanding of how to use the RMGR ISPF interface and batch utilities.

Performing the recovery process requires basic skills and knowledge of RMGR. If you are not an experienced user of RMGR, BMC recommends that you practice the following skills before you try to perform recovery in a live situation:

Creating groups
Building and using profiles
Finding recovery points and analyzing logs
Using recovery options and creating recovery JCL

The process of preparing for application recovery (discussed in this section) gives you an opportunity to practice these skills.

About application recovery

Application recovery consists of the preparations and procedures for resuming data processing tasks after a problem causes loss or damage to one or more databases.

Typical problems include logic errors in application programs that update the data, failures in the hardware devices that store the data, and procedural errors in the management of the data. The goal of application recovery is to get the lost or damaged databases back into the condition they were in before the problem occurred and to get the applications that use those databases running again. The challenge is to do so in the least amount of elapsed time, with the least loss of data, and with complete data integrity, all while using data processing resources wisely.

Scope and situation

Application recovery typically involves recovery of a set of related databases.

You seldom need to recover only a single database because a problem that affects one database often affects all of the other databases that share common characteristics with it. For example, an application program that incorrectly updates a database often causes all other programs that access that database to update other databases with the incorrect data. A hardware device problem that damages one database often damages all of the other databases that are stored on the same device.

Application recovery is almost always a high-stress situation. A business-critical operation of your company may be halted while you perform the application recovery. Precious time, money, and customer goodwill are consumed in every second that the data is unavailable. Executive scrutiny of your actions and the results of the recovery process are inevitable.

While no application recovery situation is ever fun, it can go smoothly if you have the right tools and prepare properly for it.

General tools for successful application recovery

Successful application recovery involves careful planning, knowledge of your processing environment, commitment of time and resources, and a set of tools and utilities. Your operating system, IMS, and other database management systems provide basic functions and utilities for tasks such as taking database backups, logging database changes, allocating database data sets, and performing database recoveries. The IMS Database Recovery Control (DBRC) feature helps to ensure IMS database integrity through management of information in the RECON data set. (RMGR requires all databases to be registered with DBRC.)

BMC tools for application recovery

BMC provides enhanced tools for ensuring the success of your application recovery effort.

These tools provide for faster backups and recoveries, with maximum use of available resources and maximum preservation of data integrity. These tools also provide functions that are not available in other products.

RMGR is ideal for helping you in the application recovery effort. It works with the IMS backup and recovery utilities, and it provides synergistic benefits when you use it with the BMC backup and recovery utilities.

Summary of application recovery processes

This section presents procedures for application recovery with RMGR in three phases:

Phase 1—Preparing for Application Recovery discusses how to get ready for application recovery with RMGR.

Phase 2—Performing Application Recovery discusses tasks to perform in various application recovery situations.

Phase 3—Evaluation of Application Recovery discusses how to judge the success of the recovery and describes some changes you may want to make to your application recovery strategy after testing it.