Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

The inability to replicate OS/400 objects was one of the things preventing the New Zealand software company Maximum Availability from effectively competing against other software companies in the OS/400 high availability market. Last week at COMMON, the company took a big step toward eliminating that mark from its dossier, when it announced *noMAX Release 7, the latest version of its OS/400 high availability software, which includes the capability to replicate most types of objects, as well as data.

In OS/400 high availability, two types of information are usually replicated from the production system to the backup system: data and objects. Until now, *noMAX only supported real-time replication of application data, requiring operators to find another way to move objects, such as data areas, data queues, or Integrated File System (IFS) files. With Release 7, Maximum Availability delivers support for most of the 36 different types of objects supported by OS/400, according to company officials.

Maximum Availability's target audience has always been midmarket customers, which overall have not been receptive to expensive high availability solutions. Until recently, high availability solutions were priced out of reach of the average midmarket customer. Maximum Availability, which introduced its software in late 2000 and early 2001, has made high availability software more affordable to the midmarket. However, its software has lacked support for real-time object replication in *noMAX, which was a barrier to its market credibility, especially with larger customers. Now, with real-time object replication as the major enhancement in Release 7, the company is positioned to increase its market penetration.

In the near future, Maximum Availability plans to roll out support for two additional types of objects that it does not support in Release 7. A company spokesman said that, within a month, Maximum Availability will deliver support for user profiles, a type of object that is important for enabling backup systems to function like a primary system, in the event of an unexpected outage. Maximum Availability will deliver another major enhancement near the end of the first quarter of 2003, when it announces support for IFS files, the spokesman said. IFS support will be a critical improvement for Maximum Availability. Many newer iSeries Web applications store files in the IFS, as do applications running on the Integrated xSeries Server and Integrated xSeries Adapters. Once these two types of objects are supported with real-time replication, *noMAX will have coverage of 95 percent of OS/400 objects, the spokesman said.

Release 7 of *noMAX is built on top of the remote journaling plumbing that IBM has built into recent releases of OS/400. By relying on IBM technology, Maximum Availability officials said they have been able to build OS/400 high availability software by spending less for research and development than companies that developed high availability software before remote journaling was available. Company officials said they have reduced not only the product's cost but also the complexity of deploying the software.

Release 7 of *noMAX is available now. New licenses for *noMAX are based on the number of apply groups that a customer buys for primary and target machines, but the company has put price caps on the maximum amount users will pay for each processor configuration, which gives them an unlimited number of apply groups. For Model 270s, it could cost as little as $20,000 to run the software on target and primary systems. For more pricing and configuration information, go to www.maximumavailability.com.