Power HA

I have been using PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i for a couple of years now.

It isn't an object based replication product and therefore doesn't care what is in the iASP, it just makes an identical copy on the target system. The mirror on the target can be detached from the source and attached to the target for BU to tape processing. OR if you are using SAN storage a Flash Copy of the iASP can be created very quickly on the target, attached to another LPAR and a BU can run from there without interrupting the regular mirroring process for more than a few minutes.

It does have the ability to synchronize certain objects from *SYSBAS to *SYSBAS on the target system but it is not a solution for keeping DB in *SYSBAS in sync. It will sync things like *USRPRF, *SBSD, *JOBD etc..

Some people use PowerHA for the iASP mirroring and another mirroring product for *SYSBAS if they need to replicate library and IFS objects residing there. At the spring Common Conference I attended a session that discussed adding a subset of Vision's replication product designed and "priced" to do just that...

We originally wanted a solution that we could implement on a "shoestring budget" and PowerHA with Geographic Mirroring of an iASP on internal disk was not very expensive to set up.

All in all PowerHA has worked well for us but we did have to add more memory on both the source and target system and more bandwidth on the connection between the two systems to eliminate some performance issues.

We are looking at moving into SAN storage and a couple of Power8's in the near future so we can remove the overhead of PowerHA from the system (mirroring would be done at the SAN level) and to get the FLASH COPY feature (which won't work with internal disk).



Reply or Forwarded mail from: Kenneth E Graap


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