Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Aldon Computer Group and Lakeview Technology announced a new partnership at the COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. As part of the partnership, Aldon has incorporated Lakeview's MIMIX technology into a new add-on product for its Aldon/CMS change-management system, allowing users to reduce by up to 90 percent the amount of downtime they experience during a standard application upgrade and maintenance cycle.

The new product, Aldon/CMS Optimum Availability (or ACMS-OA), is an OEM version of Lakeview's MIMIX Promoter that Aldon has also directly integrated with its Aldon/CMS change management system. Lakeview's Promoter minimizes downtime by performing database maintenance activities on a "shadow" copy of a production OS/400 database, then swapping the databases during a short period of downtime. Promoter's two core features are Reorganize While Active and File Promotion While Active.

ACMS-OA is using Promoter's "while active" capability to let Aldon/CMS users update or change their production applications without causing hours of downtime. Aldon has also integrated Promoter directly with Aldon/CMS, which means developers can control ACMS-OA from the Aldon/CMS interface without learning how to use Lakeview's product.

The amount of downtime that Aldon/CMS shops can avoid with ACMS-OA is considerable. "Developers can reduce 80 to 90 percent of the production downtime normally taken for maintenance and upgrades simply by letting development and production continue while upgrades take place in the background" with ACMS-OA, says Aldon President Daniel Magid.

Aldon's vice president of sales, Ronald Put, says "23/7" availability is well within reach with ACMS-OA. Without the new product, his customers' OS/400 servers are usually offline for several hours while implementing the application and database changes that they managed with Aldon/CMS. "There is absolutely a downtime requirement [with ACMS-OA], but it's a scheduled downtime, about 20 minutes to a half-hour," he says. "It's not 24/7. That's why I jokingly call it 23/7."

(A Lakeview spokesperson pointed out that the 20 to 30 minutes customers may be down with ACMS-OA is not a limiting factor of Promoter.)

ACMS-OA is a key component of Aldon's Single Point of Control initiative, which involves managing the entire lifecycle of application development, production, and implementation. "It allows us to go the final step and take a piece of software from development into production without causing lots of downtime," Put says. "Actual migrations, database conversions, can happen in parallel, without kicking off the end users."

ACMS-OA can significantly reduce the amount of downtime that Aldon/CMS users experience when moving to a new release of their application. But that's not all it can do. Because Aldon also offers access to ACMS-OA through a command line interface (as well as through the Aldon/CMS interface), users also can get the full functionality of MIMIX Promoter. That means shops can use the product's Reorganize While Active capabilities.

There are currently no plans to offer ACMS-OA, or a similar type of product, to users of Aldon's open system change management system, Affiniti. Those users are not currently facing the same needs and requirements as AS/400 and iSeries shops, Put says.

ACMS-OA is available immediately through Aldon. Pricing is tier-based and ranges from $4,000 at the P05 level to $21,000 at the P50 level. For more information on MIMIX Promoter, go to www.lakeviewtech.com. For more information on Aldon/CMS and ACMS-OA, go to www.aldon.com.