Challenges of DB2 Restore in a Distributed Systems Environment and Engineered Solutions

Abstract

Cloud computing and cloud storage enables modern day enterprises to store and access massive amounts of data quickly and efficiently every day. One of the major challenges of cloud storage and cloud computing is ensuring the reliability and availability of data due to network instability and virtual environment crashes. There are many approaches to data persistence, including periodic replication and data backup. However, the process of backing up a database and restoring it in a distributed multi-application environment often renders a data store unavailable, which may compromise the data and application availability. This paper explores some of the unique challenges encountered while restoring DB2 databases in a multi-application, virtual cloud environment for the Watson Health Cloud platform due to fast connecting applications, and discusses the engineered solutions to alleviate the failures.