IBM PowerHA High Availability Disaster Recovery Fix SYSBAS non-IASP Data Applications

IBM PowerHA fix for iSeries HA and DR environments enables replication of SYSBAS data and applications that cannot reside in IASP, adds monitoring and change safe guards for role swaps, and other features needed for high availability and disaster recovery requirements. Understanding PowerHA gaps in its replication capabilities for the IBM iSeries SAN that can cause a DR or HA role swap to fail, and Syncsort PowerHA fix provides the additional data protection and monitoring features needed for an actual failover. When used inconjunction with the iSeries HA software, data can be replicated to multiple systems for DR, queries, reporting and data distribution purposes.

iSeries HA High Availability software for AS400 systems provides real-time two way replication of a production system to one or more recovery systems that is local, remote or in the cloud, for complete data protection against both planned and unplanned downtime. A high availability solution that will protect your iSeries data and keep your business running regardless of the situation. Using HA software in an unplanned production outage, operations will continue on the failover system without data loss and minimal downtime. iSeries HA provides a higher level of protection than DR software, but less than Continuous Availability offerings. High availability software is for companies that can only afford minutes of downtime and require critical iSeries applications available and access to data 24/7/365. In addition to unplanned downtime events, Vision HA will also eliminate downtime caused by backups, upgrades, maintenance tasks, new applications, testing and other events that routinely interrupt production systems.

High Availability Features

• Prevents data loss in any situation
• Flexible combinations of different hardware, storage, OS, and location types
• Two-way replication and to multiple systems
• Scales for the most demanding volumes of transaction environments
• Utilizes OS400 journaling to ensure data integrity
• Replicates only changes for maximum efficiency and minimal bandwidth usage
• Supports replication of over 70 different object types
• Replication from and to internal and external storage
• Allows for role swap simulation for failover testing (without impacting production)
• Monitors recovery system to detect and repair unauthorized changes
• Autonomous self-healing features that minimizes daily monitoring
• Detailed and automated audit reports
• email notifications and SNMP alerts
• Allows recovery systems to be used to run queries and reports
• Intuitive browser interface to monitor and manage operations
• Single click failover simplicity
• Setup wizard for implementing high availability best practices
• Centralized management of all HA environments with birds eye, real-time status
• Incorporates customizable procedures to automate tasks that eliminate human error
• Includes iSeries performance optimization
• Target side monitoring
• Upgradable to Continuous Availability Edition

A key strength of Vision high availability solutions is its decades of experience and utilization of IBM OS400 remote journaling. It very efficiently gets all data changes from production (including those not covered by remote journaling, such as database files, data areas, data queues and IFS objects), into a buffer on the recovery system. Multiple apply paths are used to apply the changes on the recovery iSeries. OS400 journaling enables a near zero “seconds” Recovery Point Objective (RPO), even when the apply process must be halted to allow other operations against the backup copy to be completed. For instance, in the event of maintenance tasks such as a backup, producton pushes changes to a buffer on the recovery system when the apply process is halted and makes data on the backup servers available for read only operations.

Some common reasons to consider Vision's High Availability solution instead of a Disaster Recovery solution

• Your recovery time objective is minutes, not hours
• Two-way replication is needed (when target system becomes production, and target needs to replicate changes to original production)
• Planned down time events costs the company to much money
• Replication to and from a switchable IASP
• Role Swaps to and from multiple systems

Optional Services

• Installation, configuration and training
• Various levels of managed services, includes annual role swap testing
• Role swap preparation and testing
• Unplanned role swap assistance
• Adjustments and optimization
• Software upgrades, fixes and service packs
• Fully managed services for High Availability or Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery System Requirements:

• OS400 V6R1 or higher (production and target systems can be at different version/release levels)