Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Every company would have fully redundant, highly available servers running their applications if they could. But high availability software is expensive, and weaving it into applications is a complex undertaking. That's why all but the largest OS/400 shops do not have high availability software, even though it has been available as long as the AS/400. This is a big problem, and one that Lakeview Technology thinks it has solved with its new MIMIX dr1 product for the iSeries.

As the name MIMIX dr1 (presumably short for "disaster recovery first") implies, the new middleware from Lakeview aims to make OS/400 shops more current than their tape archives, to improve the quality and speed of disaster recovery on their AS/400 and iSeries servers. While Lakeview's MIMIX software helps to stop server outages from happening in the first place--by keeping clustered machines running OS/400 and its applications in lockstep, as online transactions are running and files are changed on the system--running a high availability program like MIMIX requires a big financial commitment and expertise. Big OS/400 shops in the financial services, insurance, telecommunications, and retail industries can easily justify acquiring a program like MIMIX and the redundant servers it requires. But the other 95 percent or so of the OS/400 installed base cannot justify such an acquisition, as evidenced by the fact that that they have not acquired high availability software in 14 years.

For the core OS/400 installed base--companies with between $10 million and $100 million in annual revenues and with extremely tight IT budgets--high availability software is just too expensive. These companies rely on daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups of their applications and data onto tape, and if a disaster hits, they will pull out those tapes and start rebuilding their system by hand. This can take days, and there is no guarantee that a tape backup actually worked. You don't know something went wrong until the restore fails, and by then it's too late. Tape is too slow and cumbersome for modern, online e-businesses, and high availability is too expensive for the midrange base. This, as Lakeview well knows, is a bad situation looking for a solution.

That's what dr1 is all about. The program leverages some of the technologies that Lakeview has developed for its MIMIX high availability software suite for OS/400 platforms and puts them to use as the basis for a much simpler and less costly solution that aims to give AS/400 and iSeries customers a way to recover quickly from disasters, rather than operate clustered servers and high-availability-enabled applications. Specifically, MIMIX dr1 is based on the Active Server technologies used in MIMIX's compare while active features for OS/400 databases; dr1 does not make use of OS/400 journaling, remote or otherwise.

Rather than rely on ROI and cost-of-downtime arguments to push its full-bore high availability middleware, Lakeview is trying to give small and midsize OS/400 shops what they really need: a program that keeps an updated snapshot of their data on a secondary set of disk drives on a remote OS/400 server, which can function as the primary machine in the event of a disaster on a production machine. Even among diligent OS/400 shops that regularly back up their information on tape, that information on tape might be anywhere from 24 to 48 hours out of date. This is not much, in terms of disaster recovery, as many OS/400 shops have found out from experience.

Depending on the transaction load on their production system, MIMIX dr1, said Lakeview, can keep a snapshot of disk archives on a secondary machine that is as little as 30 minutes out of date. The idea with MIMIX dr1 is to take a snapshot of disk archives, then keep track of what data changes on the system throughout the day. As the production OS/400 server hits natural lulls in transaction processing--shift changes, coffee breaks, and so forth--data changes are gathered and sent over to the secondary machine running MIMIX dr1, so it can be updated. Information gathered between the times when snapshots are passed to the secondary machine are archived on the production machine and can be applied at the convenience of the IT organization if a system is knocked offline. The secondary machine has a data set that applications can access immediately. Getting users hooked up to this machine is no small task, neither is booting up applications, but companies get to skip the tape-restore process, which is the hard part about disaster recovery.

MIMIX dr1 will be available in the first quarter of 2003. Sources at Lakeview said at COMMON last week that pricing was not yet finalized for the product, but concurred that they were shooting for something in the range of one-third to one-half the price of its MIMIX high availability software. MIMIX dr1 will be based on OS/400 tiered pricing, just like the full MIMIX suite. Customers using it will have to install it on both their production and secondary OS/400 servers.

In addition to the MIMIX dr1 announcement last week, Lakeview announced enhancements to the MIMIX suite. The company said that it has improved its support for remote journaling specifically and journaling in general, as it relates to journaling minimal data, Integrated File System files, data areas, data queues, and large objects. MIMIX V4R4 also features a new graphical administration interface that can consolidate the views of multiple OS/400 servers into one set of screens. Other improvements were also announced, including a reduction in the time it takes to switch between primary and backup servers in a high availability cluster, a more thorough set of auditing and reporting tools for the high availability environment, and a more automated way to manage the high availability cluster. Lakeview also announced MIMIX for Windows V4R2 software, used to provide high availability coverage for information resident on Integrated xSeries Servers running Windows and on external xSeries machines running Windows that are connected to AS/400 and iSeries machines through Integrated xSeries Adapters. These improvements were primarily involved with cutting down the amount of information passed around in a high availability environment running MIMIX for Windows and giving customers more flexible options when they restore Windows servers attached to OS/400 machines.