Understanding high availability for Direct Link
High availabilityThe ability of a service or workload to withstand failures and continue providing processing capability according to some predefined service level. For services, availability is defined in the Service Level Agreement. Availability includes both planned and unplanned events, such as maintenance, failures, and disasters. (HA) is a core discipline in an IT infrastructure to keep your apps up and running, even after a partial or full site failure. The main purpose of high availability is to eliminate potential points of failures in an IT infrastructure.
IBM Cloud highly recommends setting up a secondary, diverse direct link to avoid outages, whether unplanned or scheduled for maintenance. Effective disaster recovery, especially for issues impacting an entire location, requires careful planning and preparation.
You are responsible for understanding your connection configuration, customization, and usage of the service. You are also responsible for being ready to re-create an instance of the service in a new location and restore your data there. For information on how to design Diversity to achieve HA with Direct Link, see Models for diversity and redundancy in Direct Link.
See How IBM Cloud ensures high availability and disaster recovery to learn more about the high availability and disaster recovery standards in IBM Cloud. You can also find information about Service Level Agreements.
Responsibilities
To find out more about responsibility ownership for using Direct Link between IBM and the customer, see Understanding your responsibilities when using Direct Link.
High availability for customer Direct Link connections
Your Direct Link connections are location-specific. It is up to you to set up any High Availability or Disaster Recovery plans that are required. For information on how to design Diversity to achieve HA with Direct Link, see Models for diversity and redundancy in Direct Link.
High availability within the service
IBM Cloud service supports high availability with no single point of failure. The service achieves high availability automatically and transparently by means of the Multi-Zone Region (MZR) feature provided by IBM Cloud.
What level of availability do I need?
You can achieve high availability on different levels in your IT infrastructure and within different components of your cluster. The level of availability that is right for you depends on several factors, such as your business requirements, the service level agreements (SLAs) that you have with your customers, and the resources that you want to expend.
What level of availability does IBM Cloud offer?
The level of availability that you set up for your cluster impacts your coverage under the IBM Cloud high availability service level agreement terms.
Service level objectives (SLOs) describe the design points that the IBM Cloud services are engineered to meet. Direct Link is designed to achieve the following availability target.
| Availability target | Target value |
|---|---|
| Availability % | 99.999% |
The SLO is not a warranty and IBM will not issue credits for failure to meet an objective. Refer to the SLAs for commitments and credits that are issued for failure to meet any committed SLAs. For a summary of all SLOs, see IBM Cloud service level objectives.
Locations
For more information about service availability within regions and data centers, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.