IBM Unveils ‘Migrate While Active’ Cloud Offering, HA Subscriptions
October 23, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM yesterday announced new subscription offerings for its continuous availability and high availability products for IBM i, Db2 Mirror and PowerHA, respectively. It also announced a “migrate while active” program to move IBM i installations to servers running in IBM’s PowerVS cloud or other Power-based clouds.
For the past two-and-a-half years, IBM has been moving its IBM i software stack, including the operating system as well as supporting facilities, like BRMS, and Cloud Storage Solutions, away from perpetual licenses and toward subscriptions. At the same time, it’s been simplifying the stack by including more utilities, such as Performance Tools and the Advanced Job Scheduler, as part of the subscription for the operating system.
PowerHA and Db2 Mirror were the last remaining supporting IBM i products that had not yet moved to a subscription model when IBMers presented a summer webinar on its product simplification and subscription journey, as we told you about last month. But with IBM’s October 22, 2024 announcement letter, those products have now made the jump over to subscriptions too.
As the announcement shows, IBM i customers can now get the PowerHA and Db2 Mirror products by choosing among six different subscriptions, including 90-day, one-year, two-year, three-year, four-year, and five-year terms. IBM Software Maintenance (SWMA) is included in the price.
PowerHA SystemMirror is IBM’s high availability software that uses SAN-based replication mechanisms (Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, and FlashCopy) as well as an internal DASD-based replication mechanism (geographic mirroring) to automatically move data from a primary server or storage system to one (or more) secondary servers or storage systems.
Db2 Mirror is IBM’s continuous availability software introduced with IBM i 7.4 that creates an active-active database cluster installed on two IBM i servers connected by a 100 Gb/sec Ethernet link that supports the low-latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocol. Because the High Speed Link (HSL) cabling that supports the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) connections are limited in length, Db2 Mirror doesn’t provide resilience to a regional disaster.
The new subscription offers are good for PowerHA SystemMirror for i 7.5 and PowerHA SystemMirror for i 7.4 Enterprise Edition. Any customer running Db2 Mirror on IBM i 7.4 or later can take advantage of the subscription.
Yesterday’s announcement also included something completely different and unexpected: a new IBM i Migrate While Active offering (5770-DBM feature 5102) to help customers move their IBM i implementations to PowerVS, IBM’s Power cloud.
The new IBM i Migrate While Active offering utilizes Db2 Mirror under the cover to replicate data from an on-premise installation of IBM i to an IBM i instance running in IBM PowerVS. While Db2 Mirror typically requires RoCE adapters, the migration service can run over a standard TCP/IP connection, IBM says.
IBM says the new offering allows users to continue working while the migration takes place. To initiate the migration, the user conducts a system save to migrate from the source to a copy node within PowerVS or other cloud provider, the company says.
“Once the system is saved, the IBM i workload can be resumed, and IBM i Migrate While Active will track changes that occur within the entire instance,” IBM continues. “After the system save has been restored in PowerVS and a secure network connection is established, the tracked changes will be synchronized to the system in PowerVS.”
A full system migration requires two planned outages. The first is for the initial system and user data save. The second outage is to complete the data synchronization and evaluation.
Like all IBM i products now, IBM i Migrate While Active is available as a subscription term offering (which makes sense, since you won’t be migrating in perpetuity). IBM provides more information on the product on its support site.
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What’s In the Latest Update to PowerHA
An well tuned option on PowerHA to copy a local iASP from on prem to cloud would be nice to have.
You keep your primary system onprem, and then you can recover in case from cloud, without having a secondary system on prem.
Would be a nice solution.
PowerHA should be run in async (in order to not delay primary), already can, but it is not clear the performance characteristics (window backpressure) in can of TCP/IP wan link over internet-vpn.