DEFINING A COMPUTER RECOVERY PROCESS THAT MATCHES THE SCOPE OF OUTAGE

• US 20090172460A1
• Filed: 12/28/2007
• Published: 07/02/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/28/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: McCONNELL, Tim A., BOBAK, Mythili K., SWANSON, Michael D.
• Granted Patent: US 8,826,077 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 714/2
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0709 in a distributed system consisting of a plurality of standalone computer nodes, e.g. clusters, client-server systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1482 by means of middleware or OS functionality
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0654 using network fault recovery ring fault isolation or reconfiguration in loop networks without recovery actions by a network management system H04L12/437

Abstract

Recovery processing is defined that matches the scope of an outage. A programmatic analysis of the resources that have been impacted, of implications of the failure and what degradations have occurred is performed to construct an appropriate level of recovery. This includes selecting the appropriate set of resources to be recovered. Recovery operations are selected based on the current state of the environment.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of facilitating recovery in an Information Technology (IT) environment, said computer-implemented method comprising:

programmatically analyzing information relating to a failure within the IT environment, said information being related to at least one of one or more resources impacted by the failure, one or more implications of the failure, or one or more resources degraded by the failure; and

programmatically determining a set of resources to be recovered based on the analyzed information, said set of resources being commensurate with a scope of the failure.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the programmatically determining iteratively performs the determining to provide the set of resources.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising selecting one or more recovery operations to be used in recovering the set of resources, said one or more recovery operations being selected based on a current state of the IT environment.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein the selecting comprises selecting the one or more recovery operations that enable a defined recovery time goal to be met.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein the selecting is iterative, and wherein a recovery operation selected to be used in recovery is an escalated operation, in response to a previous recovery operation failing.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, further comprising ordering the one or more recovery operations to be executed.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, further comprising executing at least a portion of the recovery operations in parallel.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein one or more recovery operations of the one or more selected recovery operations comprise a recovery process, and wherein the method further comprises:

executing one or more selected recovery operations of the recovery process; and

for each executed recovery operation, providing a completion indication to the recovery process.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, further comprising performing one or more actions, subsequent to completion of the recovery process.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, further comprising providing a visualization of the recovery process.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, further comprising monitoring execution of at least one of the one or more selected recovery operations being executed or the recovery process.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the programmatically analyzing determines a root cause for the failure.

13. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the failure is related to a business application of the IT environment, and wherein the business application has an availability goal associated therewith.

14. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the set of resources comprises a non-responsive resource, and wherein the method further comprises invoking one or more recovery operations for the non-responsive resource prior to invoking recovery operations for the remaining set of resources.

15. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the information includes resource data and resource relationship data.

16. A system of facilitating recovery in an Information Technology (IT) environment, said system comprising:

a memory to store programmatically analyzed information relating to a failure within the IT environment, said information being related to at least one of one or more resources impacted by the failure, one or more implications of the failure, or one or more resources degraded by the failure; and

at least one processor to programmatically determine a set of resources to be recovered based on the analyzed information, said set of resources being commensurate with a scope of the failure.

17. The system of claim 16, further comprising at least one processor to select one or more recovery operations to be used in recovering the set of resources, said one or more recovery operations being selected based on a current state of the IT environment, and wherein the selecting comprises selecting the one or more recovery operations that enable a defined recovery time goal to be met.

18. An article of manufacture comprising:

at least one computer usable medium having computer readable program code logic to facilitate recovery in an Information Technology (IT) environment, said computer readable program code logic when executing performing the following;

programmatically analyzing information relating to a failure within the IT environment, said information being related to at least one of one or more resources impacted by the failure, one or more implications of the failure, or one or more resources degraded by the failure; and

programmatically determining a set of resources to be recovered based on the analyzed information, said set of resources being commensurate with a scope of the failure.

19. The article of manufacture of claim 18, further comprising selecting one or more recovery operations to be used in recovering the set of resources, said one or more recovery operations being selected based on a current state of the IT environment, and wherein the selecting comprises selecting the one or more recovery operations that enable a defined recovery time goal to be met.

20. The article of manufacture of claim 18, wherein one or more recovery operations of the one or more selected recovery operations comprise a recovery process, and wherein the method further comprises:

executing one or more selected recovery operations of the recovery process; and

for each executed recovery operation, providing a completion indication to the recovery process.