High availability and disaster recovery for Direct Link

The IBM Cloud® Direct Link global service is highly available within any IBM Cloud location. However, recovering from disasters that affect an entire location requires 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.

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.

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.

Disaster recovery

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.

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.