*noMAX Supports i OS Disk Encryption for HA

January 20, 2009 Alex Woodie

Protection of valuable data is an important thing for a business. For many companies, it’s one of the main reasons why they chose the System i server in the first place. However, companies that relied on Maximum Availability‘s high availability software to protect their data from disasters and system outages could not take advantage of the new on-disk encryption capabilities that IBM delivered with i 6.1 last year. That changed last week, when MaxAv developed a new release of *noMAX that’s compatible with IBM encryption.

New Zealand-based Maximum Availability has been selling its remote journaling-based high availability products since the beginning of the decade. The company has concentrated on making its product easy to implement and affordable for smaller users, which has translated into a customer base of over a hundred installations in 40 different countries.

Last week, the vendor unveiled a new release of *noMAX that can replicate data that’s been encrypted using IBM’s on-disk encryption capabilities. Customers can have both source and target databases on encrypted disks when using *noMAX to replicate their data, the company says.

That opens up a world of new opportunities for *noMAX customers, who are no longer forced to choose between security of data via encryption or high availability replication.

“It is fast becoming standard practice to treat all data as sensitive,” says MaxAv CEO Allan Campbell, “and with a much wider range of customers looking at ways to meet increasingly onerous security standards, we have moved quickly to ensure these benefits can be enjoyed by *noMAX’s customers.”

MaxAv sells three versions of *noMAX. At the low end is *noMAX Sentry, which is a disaster recovery product that utilizes remote journaling to move data (but not objects) to a backup System i server at pre-defined intervals. *noMAX Defender adds to Sentry the capability to replicate objects like data areas, data queues, and user profiles, and provides role-swap capabilities for running applications off the back-up system. The most feature-rich product is *noMAX Garrison, which adds to Defender support for replicating IFS assets and provides more powerful customization tools.

Campbell says the addition of support for IBM disk encryption is an example of MaxAv’s commitment to “real and relevant innovation. Watch out for many more examples in 2009,” he says.