I Scheduled a DR and Didn't Come Back: Moving a Datacenter to MFaaS

Project and Program: MVS, MVS Core Technologies

Tags: Proceedings, SHARE Phoenix 2019, 2019

Our z9 was ten years old and WSU decided to move to Mainframe as a Service (MFaaS). After the usual RFQ/RFP/SOW stuff, we moved to Omaha.
We first shifted the Virtual Tape offsite copy. The spent about 6 months perfecting the back-up and restoration of 4 Lpars. Final migration was the end of December 2017. After the initial IPL, the production Lpar was not ipled again for several months.
We are on the other side of a VPN tunnel from our datacenter. We leveraged our f5 load balancer to keep the same IP numbers as we were using locally.
Since it's easier to plan a recovery than deal with a real one, we decided to leverage the migration work into a truly workable recovery plan. We just finished a test of shifting to restored systems at Chicago. Much was revealed for the next attempt, which we are thinking of doing the end of February.-Dave Gibney-Washington State University

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