WORKFLOW MODEL FOR COORDINATING THE RECOVERY OF IT OUTAGES BASED ON INTEGRATED RECOVERY PLANS

• US 20100268568A1
• Filed: 04/21/2009
• Published: 10/21/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 04/21/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Starz, Thomas, Schneider, Juergen P., Werner, Jeremias, Ochs, Georg
• Granted Patent: US 8,265,980 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/0633 Workflow analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management

Abstract

One aspect of the present invention provides a workflow model to effectively respond to outage events within an IT infrastructure. This workflow model enables a combination of manual and automated processing to effectively deploy a flexible, plannable, and testable recovery to outages and problems encountered within IT infrastructure settings. In one embodiment, a shared processing context is created to accompany the operations of the workflow, thereby collecting useful data in one location related to events and status information during the outage and the outage response. Within the workflow, analysis of the outage event is performed, an appropriate recovery plan is selected, the selected recovery plan is implemented, and recovery to the outage event is completed. Data collected within the processing context can be analyzed to obtain post mortem analysis and continuous service improvements. Accordingly, the improvements can be implemented within the IT infrastructure directly or within the appropriate recovery plan.

Claims

1. A method of deploying a workflow model to coordinate recovery of an outage within an IT infrastructure through execution of an integrated recovery plan, comprising:

initiating a workflow responsive to the occurrence of an outage event;

creating a processing context for the workflow;

adding data to the processing context throughout the workflow related to the outage event, outage type, failed resources within the IT infrastructure, status of critical resources within the IT infrastructure, recovery options supplied by an operational management product, and contact information for the operational management product;

executing the workflow, including performing the steps of;

requesting automated analysis of the outage event to enrich the processing context;

engaging one or more responsible parties to manually perform analysis of the outage event and select a recovery plan from a plurality of recovery plans;

obtaining approval of the selected recovery plan from one or more decision making parties defined within the selected recovery plan;

declaring a disaster by utilizing notification templates defined within the selected recovery plan;

implementing the selected recovery plan upon the IT infrastructure to recover from the outage event, including executing recovery options within the selected recovery plan;

verifying recovery to the outage event within the IT infrastructure by performing verifications upon results of the selected recovery plan implementation; and

declaring recovery complete responsive to obtaining notifications produced by execution of the selected recovery plan; and

analyzing the processing context to obtain post mortem analysis of recovery to the outage event with the selected recovery plan and to create continuous service improvements for the IT infrastructure.