ACADEMIA

Vision Solutions has announced the release of MIMIX Availability 7 . With innovative features that minimize administration and ensure data integrity, MIMIX Availability 7 provides businesses running Power Systems with disaster recovery and high availability by replicating production environments to a backup server in real-time with zero data loss. This backup server can be used for disaster recovery or high availability (HA) and switch roles to become the production server when needed.

-- The new MIMIX Availability 7 leverages the best of Vision Solutions' OMS/ODS (formerly ORION Solutions HA) and MIMIX HA offerings to extend its leadership in the IBM i high availability and disaster recovery market.

-- The product offers a new graphical interface, referred to as the Vision Solutions Portal (VSP). This new browser-based interface provides users with a customized view of their MIMIX Availability 7 environment for enhanced monitoring, management and control.

-- The product update now includes automated IBM i system optimization, which improves system efficiency and makes MIMIX Availability 7 the only HA product on the market that includes system optimization as a core part of its offering.

-- MIMIX Availability 7 also has enhanced operational management capabilities. In addition to automating and improving common operations, users now have the ability to create additional customized procedures for critical operations with improved performance and reliability.

-- The new MIMIX Global offering, as part of the MIMIX Availability 7 release, simplifies and automates the monitoring and switching of MIMIX and Hybrid clusters and provides fully integrated control of multi-node, multi-technology high availability environments from a single management interface.

Product Highlights:

-- New User Interface

Easily configurable, the new browser-based interface allows multi-product monitoring and control. Built on an industry-standard portal architecture, the Vision Solutions Portal (VSP) enables user selected portlets to be arranged to provide a customized view of the MIMIX Availability 7 environment for monitoring, management and control. The VSP allows multiple HA environment monitoring, single button switch control and problem resolution capabilities. Easily customizable, VSP delivers enhanced usability and powerful monitoring.

-- Automated System Optimization

An optimized, healthy production system is the building block of an efficient, reliable HA environment. MIMIX Availability 7 is now the only HA product that includes IBM i system optimization as a core part of its offering. With the added system optimization features, MIMIX customers will experience a more optimized high availability environment through better storage utilization, improved application and batch performance, and faster backup operations. The included system optimization functions are highly automated and help improve the system administrator's efficiency and give them more time to focus on other issues besides manual system management tasks.

-- Improved Operations Management

The framework used to enable the new switch operations also provides the ability for the customer to create additional customized procedures for other important operations. Customers benefit from these customized step-by-step operations through improved performance and reliability. Additionally, this new framework provides improved granularity in terms of tracking and reporting so customers have a better insight into what is going on in their HA environment and now have better, more detailed information to troubleshoot problems.

-- Performance and Scalability Enhancements

A new user-configurable caching technique on the target system yields dramatic improvements to overall replication performance. In addition, improved handling of access path maintenance will yield significant apply performance benefits on the target system.

-- Enhanced Switch Architecture

The new version of MIMIX Availability 7 has substantial enhancements in switch (role-swap) operations. The MIMIX Switch Assistant feature has been extended to include a robust new procedural-based Switch Framework. This provides a fully automated switch process and delivers a more efficient switch experience for customers. MIMIX Availability 7 now comes pre-configured with a robust set of procedures which can be customized and enhanced. Common MIMIX operations like planned switch, unplanned switch, end application group replication, switch pre-check, end target processes, start application group replication are automatically set up for the environment by application group.

-- Application Group Support

MIMIX Availability 7 introduces the concept of application groups. User can now consolidate multiple data groups under a single application group enabling them to switch multiple data groups with a single command.

-- Reporting Enhancements

MIMIX Availability 7 includes significant expansions on its reporting capabilities. With new historical reporting for all objects and improved reporting on the history of switch operations, users will now have better insight and analysis of trends over time, improved audit reporting and have the ability to use the information to optimize their switching, audits and other operations.

-- MIMIX Global

The new MIMIX Global offering greatly simplifies and automates the monitoring and switching of MIMIX and Hybrid clusters. Leveraging the IBM i cluster node management, monitoring and switching features, MIMIX Global delivers fully integrated control of multi-node, multi-technology high availability environments from a single management interface. Included in the product is Sysbas Protection, providing replication of objects and applications that the customer is not able to migrate into an IASP or otherwise replicate in a switchable IASP based solution.

Quotes

Alan Arnold, chief technology officer at Vision Solutions Inc.:

"By bringing together the best of our highly acclaimed MIMIX HA and OMS/ODS (formerly known as ORION Solutions HA) products, MIMIX Availability 7 offers Power Systems users a high availability solution that is affordable and easy to use. MIMIX Availability 7 provides customers with the peace of mind that it will work quickly and efficiently whenever needed. The positive customer feedback we've received about the new Vision Solutions Portal interface, the expanded system optimization and the operations management capabilities indicates the effectiveness and reliability of this comprehensive solution."

David L. Fahrenkrug, iSeries platform manager, APL Logistics:

"MIMIX Availability 7 enables us to meet the needs of our customers around the world every day. Also, the MIMIX Availability audits are now more robust and more self-healing. Combine that with the additional information provided in the status screens, and it inspires a feeling of confidence in our HA readiness."

Kevin Haines, Enterprise One CNC administrator, Rockline Industries, Inc.:

"Our transition from OMS/ODS to MIMIX Availability 7 was remarkably easy. The specialized on-line training content Vision developed to familiarize OMS customers with MIMIX made the whole transition very straightforward."