Understanding business continuity and disaster recovery for Direct Link

Disaster recoveryThe ability of a service or workload to recover from rare, major incidents and wide-scale failures, such as service disruption. This includes a physical disaster that affects an entire region, corruption of a database, or the loss of a service contributing to a workload. The impact exceeds the ability of the high availability design to handle it. involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures for returning a system, an application, or an entire data center to full operation after a catastrophic interruption. It includes procedures for copying and storing an installed system's essential data in a secure location, and for recovering that data to restore normalcy of operation.

In the event of a catastrophic failure that impacts an entire region, and the Direct Link physical link between on-premises and IBM Cloud was in that region, you would experience an outage. If you require a highly available connection to IBM Cloud, it is imperative that you have a redundant connection in a second region. If you decide to rely on a single connection, it is recommended that you back up all configuration elements in case you would ever have to re-create your Direct Link gateway and virtual connections. For information on how to design Diversity to achieve HA with Direct Link, see Models for diversity and redundancy in Direct Link.

Responsibilities

To find out more about responsibility ownership for using IBM Cloud® products between IBM and customer see Understanding your responsibilities when using Direct Link.

Disaster recovery strategy

IBM Cloud has business continuityThe capability of a business to withstand outages and to operate mission-critical services normally and without interruption in accordance with predefined service-level agreements. plans in place to provide for the recovery of services within hours if a disaster occurs. You are responsible for your data backup and associated recovery of your content.

Direct Link provides mechanisms to protect your data and restore service functions. Business continuity plans are in place to achieve targeted recovery point objectiveIn disaster recovery planning, the time at which data is restored measured in time (seconds, minutes, hours) starting at the recovered instance and ending at the point of disaster. (RPO) and recovery time objectiveIn disaster recovery planning, the duration of time for a business process to be restored after a disaster. (RTO) for the service. The following table outlines the targets for Direct Link.

RPO and RTO for Direct Link
Disaster recovery objective	Target value
RPO	24 hrs
RTO	24 hrs

Locations

For more information about service availability within regions and data centers, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.

Backing up Direct Link gateways for disaster recovery

Be prepared to re-create your Direct Link gateways and connections. This section helps you ensure that you have all the data needed.

Direct Link backups are cross-regionally durable. Backups are stored across multiple regions, and are restorable to other regions.

Preserve a list of all your direct links and their connections. To do so, perform the following procedure:

The following steps use the IBM Cloud CLI, but you can also use the IBM Cloud console or API.

Use the ibmcloud dl gateways command to list details about all your direct links. Save this output.
For each gateway, use the ibmcloud dl virtual-connections GATEWAY_ID command to list information about its connections. Save this output.

For more information, see the Direct Link CLI reference.

Saving the information that is returned from these commands helps you recover from a failure quickly. If a failure occurs, use the saved information and run the ibmcloud dl gateway-create and ibmcloud dl virtual-connection-create commands to re-create your direct links and their connections.