IBM Multi-site Workload Lifeline ("Lifeline") is a z/OS-focused continuous availability workload monitoring and routing product designed to keep selected, business-critical transaction workloads reachable across two sites. It does this by:
- Monitoring workload/application health across sites via Lifeline Agents and Advisors
- Issuing routing recommendations to load balancers (via SASP, RFC 4678) for TCP/IP workloads
- Influencing routing for IBM MQ cluster workloads so messages flow to the intended site and are redirected on failures
IBM states Lifeline can substantially reduce recovery time for critical workloads compared with traditional DR approaches; independent benchmarks are not publicly available and actual recovery time objectives depend on architecture, replication behavior, and operational procedures.
Supported workload types (per IBM): TCP/IP, Linux on IBM Z workloads, SNA workloads, IBM MQ cluster workloads, and Db2 sysplex routed workloads.
Where Lifeline sits architecturally: Lifeline is often deployed as part of GDPS Continuous Availability (GDPS CA), and IBM also documents use as a standalone component in some architectures.