Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Lakeview's New 'Co-pilot' Keeps an Eye on Switchover Readiness

Lakeview Technology is shipping a new piece of software that should help answer the question that keeps MIMIX operators up at night: am I ready to do a switchover? Previously, users of Lakeview's MIMX high-availability software for OS/400 had to run reports from several green screens to get that answer. With the new Availability Co-pilot, which ships as part of an updated MIMIX Browser, operators get a graphical, color-coded representation of the state of their MIMIX environment.

The Availability Co-pilot operates within a Microsoft Internet Explorer (Version 5.5 and later) browser and continually updates MIMIX operators on their OS/400 high availability environment, watching in particular for file or object synchronization problems or file locks, which will put the whammy on any switchover. The Co-pilot collects this information in the background and displays a simple screen that shows the operator, using green and red lights, whether the MIMIX source or target servers are ready for a switchover.

If the Co-pilot shows a green light, the system is ready for a switchover. And if there is a red light, Co-pilot lets operators drill down for more information about the condition, and even receive information about possible fixes to the problem. The Co-pilot also features error logging, as well as filters that operators can use to tailor the number and type of messages that the product alerts them to.

These may sound like new features, but Lakeview has always provided tools for monitoring MIMIX installations, especially for big implementations that keep thousands of different files and objects in synch across multiple servers. The problem was that, before the Availability Co-pilot, there was no single screen that gathered and presented all of this information in a central location. Instead, MIMIX operators would have to navigate from green screen to green screen, running reports that, when viewed together, would yield the answer to that seeming simplest of questions: am I ready to do a switchover?

"The number-one customer-modification request has been, 'I think things are in synch, but I need something to tell me, am I ready to switch over?' " says Bill Hammond, Lakeview's director of product marketing. "You would have to run all these reports to find out if you were ready to do a planned switchover."

Now, with the Co-pilot, MIMIX users can see immediately which source and target servers are ready to switch over, and get help with the ones that aren't. "This is a big improvement in the usability for us," Hammond says. "It's huge."

Hammond expects the Availability Co-pilot to find its most receptive audience among people who are new to MIMIX, as experienced MIMIX hands will probably prefer to stay within the green-screen environment, which is still available. There is a perception that high availability products are complex applications, he says, and that is driving more demand for GUIs, among Lakeview's products as well as the competition's, to help manage them.

MIMIX shops can expect to see more functionality added to the Availability Co-pilot down the road. For example, the next step for the Co-pilot might be to allow it to initiate a switchover between iSeries servers on its own, under certain conditions. This would be an example of the type of functionality that IBM is advocating as part of its autonomic computing initiative, and is the sort of thing Lakeview envisioned when it named its new product, Hammond says. "When I'm not around to fly the plane, give these instructions to the copilot, so he can do it automatically," he says.

The Availability Co-pilot uses a mixture of Java, JavaScript, and cascading style sheets technology. It is offered, as a component of the MIMIX Browser, free of charge, to all MIMIX V4R4 customers. For more information, go to www.mimix.com.