Understanding high availability and disaster recovery for Quantum Compute
High availability (HA) is the ability for a service to remain operational and accessible in the presence of unexpected failures. Disaster recovery is the process of recovering the service instance to a working state. IBM Quantum Compute Service customers are not responsible for disaster recovery planning or actions.
Quantum Compute is a regional service that fulfills the defined Service Level Objectives (SLO) with any paid plan. For more information, see the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for IBM Cloud®. For more information about the available IBM Cloud regions and data centers for Quantum Compute, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.
High availability architecture
High availability features
This service is provisioned across three zones in a multi-zone region with no single point of failure. API requests are routed through a load balancer to the HA instance nodes, each in a different zone.
If an HA instance node or zone fails, the service continues to run API requests through to the surviving HA instance nodes. No noticeable degradation of service occurs during a zonal failure.
It is available in the following regions:
- Washington DC (us-east)
- Frankfurt (eu-de)
Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) covers the steps required to restore IBM Quantum Compute Service to a working state after a regional failure or other major incident.
IBM responsibilities
IBM is responsible for the following disaster recovery tasks:
- Restoring or rebuilding the provisioning environments and resources in the affected region.
- Automatically recovering and restoring IBM Quantum Compute Service capabilities to normal operations following a regional or major incident.
Your responsibilities
If a regional failure occurs, IBM recommends the following course of action.
Switch to an alternate region (recommended)
If your workload allows it, provision a new IBM Quantum Compute Service instance in the alternate region and resubmit any impacted jobs there. This is the fastest path to resuming operations.
You might not be able to switch regions if, for example:
- Your work requires specific qubit characteristics that are only available in the affected region.
- Regulatory or data-residency requirements prevent you from using a different region.
Wait for service recovery in your region
If switching regions is not an option, wait for IBM to recover the service in your region. IBM will communicate status and progress through the IBM Cloud status page. After recovery is confirmed, resubmit any impacted jobs.
Additional responsibilities
For a full breakdown of IBM and customer responsibilities during a disaster recovery event, see Disaster recovery in the Responsibilities topic.