DataMirror's iCluster Improves in Monitoring, Performance

Published: July 18, 2006

by Alex Woodie

One of the knocks on OS/400 high availability solutions over the years has been determining whether the systems are ready for a failover. While all of the pieces may be in place to shift to a backup machine, making this determination often involves navigating various screens, which soaks up precious time. DataMirror recently issued a new release of its iCluster that centralizes this information on a single console and keeps the administrator informed of the progress of a failover. iCluster 4.0 also features performance improvements.

iCluster is DataMirror's flagship high availability offering for OS/400 systems. The software, which supports IBM's advanced cluster services as well as more traditional high availability topologies, is based on the company's High Availability Suite, which is still sold but not actively marketed.

With iCluster version 4.0, failing over from one iSeries to another should take less time thanks to a single GUI that centralizes all the information from source and target systems. This system, called the consolidated GUI backup monitor, combines information previously available on other GUI and green-screen consoles into one location. As such, it provides administrators with the information they need to determine whether a failover can be successful.

The GUI backup monitor allows administrators to monitor each mirroring group as data is replicated, and even allows administrators to drill down into individual mirroring groups to view and manage any out-of-sync errors. The GUI uses color coding to improve readability.

The GUI backup monitor also delivers step-by-step monitoring of the failover process. For example, it will tell the administrator that his user exit program is running, or that iCluster is turning on journaling on certain files, if the customer was previously running the backup system with journaling turned off . "The new feature allows administrators to monitor each step within the switchover process to feel confident that the failover is progressing as planned," a company spokeswoman says.

DataMirror has also bolstered the throughput of iCluster with version 4.0. The throughput increase is partially a result of the enhancements that first appeared in DataMirror's Integration Suite offering last year, which set a throughput record for iSeries data replication last year (see "DataMirror Claims Top Benchmark for Data Replication").

The other part of the performance boost is the result of new parallel processing techniques that boost the product's apply process by up to 250 percent, the company claims. Large companies that deal with large data volumes, such as call centers in the telecom industry that generate random updates across large files when call detail records are updated, will benefit the most from the new parallel processing technique, the spokeswoman says.

This release also builds on DataMirror's existing MatchMerge feature, which helps ensure that primary and secondary systems are always in sync by ensuring that object-level changes are properly synchronized with record-level activity.

DataMirror has also shifted the version numbers of iCluster with this release. Seven months ago, DataMirror shipped iCluster version 2.2. The company decided to jump up to version 4.0 to reflect the fact that iCluster is the flagship product, a position formerly enjoyed by the HA Suite. The last release of HA Suite was version 3.7.

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