JobQGenie Delivers Better Job Queue Replication for HA and DR

March 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

A new release of the JobQGenie software from Shield Advanced Solutions does a better job of sharing IBM i job data between primary and backup target servers, which should lead to smoother IBM i operations and more accurate job re-creation following a high availability failover or disaster recovery scenario.

JobQGenie was developed to address a functionality gap in IBM i high availability and disaster recovery software. While HA and DR products generally do a thorough job of replicating data, program objects, and settings like user profiles, they don’t provide much functionality when it comes to replicating job queues between source and target servers. By providing a mechanism to replicate the contents of job queues–such as end-of-day batch jobs–JobQGenie helps to ensure a more complete IBM i environment is ready to run on the backup server when disaster strikes.

The improvement that Shield made to JobQGenie has to do with the information in an IBM i job queue about future jobs. When a job is submitted to a job queue, the vendor says, IBM i saves the submitted library list as well as the local data area (*LDA) data with the job information, and keeps it ready for when the job becomes active.

While JobQGenie has always been able to collect the library list data when a job went into active state, it did not have access to the *LDA data. When it came to jobs that were waiting on the queue, the utility had to rely on the use of job descriptions to get accurate library list information for job re-submission on the target machine, according to Shield president Chris Hird.

This was not an ideal situation, and has been a concern of JobQGenie customers for some time, especially in circumstances where IBM i applications use *LDA for passing user data to programs. In these circumstances, the job would not run correctly on the target machine.

But thanks to new a new API exposed by IBM, Shield now has a way to collect this *LDA information in JobQGenie. This marks a major improvement in the product, according to Shield, and opens JobQGenie to a new class of users who could otherwise not use it.

“With access to this new data, we can now provide a totally seamless and unobtrusive way to ensure the job runs in the same operating environment as it should have run initially,” Hird says in a press release. “This is a big improvement for us and one which our customers have been asking about for a long time.”

The new functionality was delivered as a PTF. Customers with current maintenance contracts can download the PTF from Shield’s website at www.shieldadvanced.ca.