Shield Unveils Enhancements, New Pricing Structure for JobQGenie

March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

Shield Advanced Solutions last week unveiled enhancements to JobQGenie, an i5/OS utility that replicates and correlates job queue data to improve the recoverability of iSeries systems during a high availability failover. It also announced a new subscription-based pricing scheme.

IBM and the i5/OS high availability software developers have done a good job writing software that replicates data and objects with a high degree of certitude, according to Shield Advanced Solutions, a company based near Toronto, Ontario.

However, there’s one area that traditional high availability solutions did not address, and that’s the problem of job-to-data correlation across replicated systems. JobQGenie helps fix this problem by mirroring the contents of the job queue and keeping track of the state of jobs on the source system, eliminating the need to manually restart jobs and speeding recovery times.

Shield unveiled a major rewrite of JobQGenie with version 5, which shipped about a year ago. Last week, the company announced additional enhancements to JobQGenie version 5, delivered as a PTF.

With the latest PTF, JobQGenie will run with less overhead thanks to new journal APIs that have been incorporated for reviewing data on target systems and researching the journals. Users can also now switch their environment types from within their high availability solution, further streamlining failover procedures. Lastly, users can now filter jobs by their status, which makes it easier for the user to understand their application restart position, the company says.

Shield also announced it’s now selling access to JobQGenie through subscription-based pricing. Customers can buy access to the product, including maintenance, for a year for $1,400 for a server in the P05 tier, up to $6,000 for the P50 tier. The software is also available through processor-based licensing which starts at $3,500 for a P05 machine