Bug Busters' HA Offering Gets Role Swap Function

Published: February 5, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Users of Bug Busters Software Engineering's high availability software for i5/OS will find it easier to switch from the production to the backup machine thanks to a new role swap feature the company has added. The role swap commands, among other new features, were added to Remote Software Facility-High Availability (RSF-HA) release 8.2, which is due to ship this quarter.

For the last couple of years, Bug Busters has been adding high availability features to RSF, which was originally developed as a way for System i shops and software vendors to distribute patches and other chunks of data among multiple machines. First came a way to synch up libraries and folders between two machines. Then came support for replication IFS files and objects, record-level mirroring, and support for the replication of data areas, data queues, and user profiles.

Now, Bug Busters has checked another big item off its list of HA product features with RSF-HA 8.2, which introduces new role swap commands that should make it faster and easier to perform planned and unplanned role swaps.

Three role swap commands have been added. The first is Start Synchronization, or STRSYNCRSF. This command starts the synchronization process using all of the features and options that users have activated for their particular environments, which should make starting synchronization faster and easier than before.

The other new commands, Role-Swap: Source to Target, or SWAPTGTRS, and Role-Swap: Target to Source, or SWAPSRCRSF, are used to turn the primary (or source) machine into backup (or target) machine, and vice versa.

Bug Busters has also written an exit program that customers can use to give the SWAPTGTRS and SWAPSRCRSF commands to execute the role swap in an orderly fashion. "We provide default programs for these that the user can modify for their environment," says Bruce Lesnick, CEO of the Seattle, Washington, company. "It's a simple but very powerful concept--any nuance the user wants to add to their role swap process can be accomplished by modifying a simple CL program."

Performing a role swap with RSF-HA was a more tedious task previously. "Before the role swap commands were added, users would have had to follow a written list of steps, which would take longer and be more prone to errors," Lesnick says.

RSF-HA 8.2 brings several other new features, including support for byte-level replication support for the Integrated File System (IFS). With this release, RSF-HA will send and apply to the target only the bytes that have change, the company says. When journaling is needed for IFS byte-level replication, RSF-HA creates and manages the journals automatically, the company says.

The product also offers new select/omit options for replicating entire libraries or IFS objects, or just small subsets of a library or object. This makes it easier for users to fine tune their HA environments.

Pricing for RSF-HA 8.2 remains the same. A license for running the product on a single box or partition ranges from $5,000 to $7,000, which means that the full HA offering costs from $10,000 to $14,000. For more information or trial downloads, visit www.bugbusters.net.

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