Shield Brings JobQGenie into Remote Journaling Fold

by Alex Woodie

Shield Advanced Solutions recently started shipping a completely rewritten version of JobQGenie, its batch job recovery utility that is commonly installed next to OS/400 high availability systems. With JobQGenie V3R2, Shield has redesigned the software to take advantage of IBM's remote journaling facility to transmit batch job data. As a result, JobQGenie is now better suited to work with the new breed of high availability software built on remote journaling, and to help users recover their systems faster and more efficiently.

Today's OS/400 high availability software suites provide continuous replication of a range of data types and objects that are needed to get a backup system online in the event of a primary system outage. These high availability suites, however, do not provide enough information about the active jobs on the job queue in order to provide a speedy recovery when the system goes down, says Chris Hird, president of Shield Advanced Solutions. He says these applications will duplicate the entire job queue object, but not its contents, providing an incomplete solution.

Shield developed JobQGenie four years ago to fill this need in the market. JobQGenie augments an OS/400 high availability setup by providing detailed data about batch jobs that are running on the production OS/400 system when it goes down. With this information, organizations that have experienced an unexpected outage can recover partially applied data and restart incomplete jobs, or jobs that were loaded but never started.

With JobQGenie V3R2, Shield has redesigned the software to use IBM's remote journaling facility to transmit data about active jobs, and thus help with recovering databases back to a known point. Shield says JobQGenie achieves this by interrogating all the journal objects on the system to identify ones that have entries related to a specific job. Armed with this information, the administrator can use techniques to either remove or apply journal changes to return to a set point.

In large part, the reason that Shield rewrote JobQGenie to use IBM's remote journaling facility was to support the growing base of OS/400 shops using high availability software built largely on remote journaling, including Echo 2 from iTera and *noMAX from Maximum Availability, Hird says. Established OS/400 high availability vendors DataMirror, Lakeview Technology, and Vision Solutions also offer remote journaling as an optional data transport method in their products.

In addition to broadening its potential market, Shield gains performance enhancements in JobQGenie by using IBM's remote journaling facility in conjunction with IBM's journal minimal data feature, which helps to minimize network bandwidth requirements by transporting only the portion of a record that has changed. In apples-to-apples comparisons, remote journaling has proved to be the fastest method to send application and system data between two or more OS/400 systems. IBM, which introduced remote journaling with OS/400 V4R2, says it is faster because it's simply "better plumbing" and located beneath OS/400, in the SLIC middleware abstraction layer.

Hird himself is a recent convert to the benefits of remote journaling. Since discovering that remote journaling can support things such as data areas, data queues, and Integrated File System objects, Hird, who was a reseller for Lakeview's MIMIX product in the United Kingdom before moving to Canada several years ago, is now a supporter of the technology.

"People are seeing the benefit of remote journaling," says Hird, who recently spent several weeks working with IBM's remote journaling guru Larry Youngren. "The high availability market is maturing. There are much better products supplied by everybody."

JobQGenie V3R2 and its companion product for distributed environments, JobQGenie Target System Module, are available now. Pricing is tier-based and ranges from $1,100 to $13,750. For more information, go to www.shield.on.ca.

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