With the latest release of Remote Software Facility 8.2, users can now do a role swap with the newly enhanced and affordable high availability solution.
How many system administrators have thought that your company really should have a high availability backup machine in place, but, for one reason or another, you are still patently vulnerable to system outages?
It's an issue that a lot of companies operating on the iSeries/System i face today, and it comes down to one of two things: money...and then there is also the question of money.
A few years back, the idea of having a high availability backup system in place was something that was considered necessary only for large organizations. That was fortunate since only large companies could afford to install and maintain one. Like everything else, the technology has evolved, and there is less maintenance today in overseeing a high availability system. The cost, however, is still high. Or is it?
IBM last year started offering discounts on hardware used for backup and recovery. But when people started checking into the total cost of ownership, they found that the software could actually set them back more than the hardware. So they hesitated, and the decision to implement a high availability system was put off for another year.
Meanwhile, the landscape was changing somewhat as the crop of high availability companies started back in the early '90s matured to where they began to merge. Fewer competitors in the marketplace is not a scenario for lower prices.
Well, there are more choices in 2008 for anyone interested in a high availability system. DataMirror, which possessed high availability technology, but wasn't marketing it aggressively, was acquired by IBM. It wasn't clear what IBM was going to do with the technology since it often gets blended into other products after an acquisition. But lo and behold, with the announcement of V6R1, IBM is offering a choice of two types of high availability for the System i. These options are now centered on whether the user wants a software or a hardware solution. MC Press Online will talk more about the IBM solution next week in Systems Insight.
However, another high availability solution has emerged into the limelight at the same time as the ones announced by IBM. It comes from Bug Busters of Seattle, Washington, a small development and engineering company run by Bruce Lesnick that has been a favorite of techies over the years for its basket of utilities, the most popular being Remote Software Facility, or RSF. This flagship product of the company started out as a solution to simplify AS/400 communications, allowing multiple machines to exchange libraries, objects, and spooled files without prior configuration or setup. RSF is used frequently by software vendors for electronic support. Over the years, Bruce and his team have continued to refine and enhance RSF, adding more and more features with each release.
With Release 8.0, RSF was offered with an optional high availability feature. If you wanted it, you just added it to your bill. With the add-on and associated commands, you could synchronize libraries and directories in the System i's Integrated File System (IFS). Execute the commands and you would be mirroring libraries and IFS directories in seconds to a backup computer. RSF gives you the ability to mirror data within the same computer, but there is some question as to how valuable this really is for the purposes of HA; it's more applicable, perhaps, for testing purposes. There is comfort, however, in knowing that all your data is mirrored someplace in real time should it get corrupted or lost due to negligence, malware, or hardware failure. It's perhaps more of a backup solution rather than one for high availability purposes.
Release 8.0, nevertheless, was the beginning of something significant at Bug Busters (not that what the company had been doing before was insignificant mind you). But 8.0 was the genesis of what today is a fully functional and well-automated high availability solution called RSF-HA, just announced this week as RSF release 8.2 and anticipated for general availability by the end of March.
Release 8.2 is the culmination of a lot of work by Bug Busters that took RSF through several evolutions, the last one being issued this past November as 8.1. That release included high availability enhancements that allowed a user to mirror profiles, system values, network attributes, authorization lists, data queues, object level authorities, and large objects. This was in addition, of course, to replicating database files, data areas, IFS objects, spooled files, message queues, and other objects included in earlier releases.
The characteristic that a modern-day high availability solution needs to be competitive in the marketplace today is role swapping. With the release of 8.2, RSF will be capable of that welcome convenience.
"In the prior releases, we didn't give folks very much help in role swapping," says Lesnick. "You could do it, but it was much more of a manual process." With 8.2, RSF offers a true high availability solution.
"By high availability, we mean you have a hot backup system that is up to date with your production system that you can switch to relatively quickly and conveniently if you need to for a planned or unplanned event."
Doing a role swap with 8.2 is a simple procedure, says Lesnick. "You go to your backup system, select a menu option, run it, wait a few minutes, and you're now ready to come back up on that system."
Of course, the thing about a high availability system is making sure that it's really working when you think it's working. RSF-HA has a central display where you can see everything that you are replicating and the status of it. It tells you if there have been any errors, and the system can be configured to automatically correct errors with a refresh should they occur. Generally, by the time the user notices an error has happened, it's already repaired, says Lesnick.
Such errors are not introduced by the replication software, however, but do occur occasionally if, say, the connection with the other machine goes down or a file is accidentally deleted on the target computer. The monitoring software is designed so that the user can get a full and accurate picture of what's been happening by just glancing at it and doesn't require scrolling through multiple screens.
Another nice feature of 8.2 is that it will replicate data at the byte level. In prior releases, the IFS could be replicated, but only at the whole object level. So for file changes, the application would send the entire file to the target. With 8.2, it will send five, or 10, or 100 bytes that have changed, depending on how the software is configured.
The magic word with high availability software, of course, is configuration. If you are missing a library when you are replicating data to the target machine, it's obviously not going to be there when you do a role swap and come up on the backup computer.
"The installation is quite simple...no more complicated than installing the base version of RSF," says Lesnick. "There is going to be some setup involved," he says, adding, "That really does depend on the complexity of the environment. If you have 10 libraries, you can probably--without exaggeration--set it up and get it ready to go in 15 minutes or a half hour. If you have hundreds of libraries, and other complex things, it's going to take longer."
Users can download RSF from the Bug Busters Web site and configure it themselves, but the company also has a network of IBM Business Partners with whom it collaborates should someone need hands-on support. Being a development and engineering firm, Bug Busters does not get involved with selling and installing new hardware, so the referral process works well since oftentimes customers will want to buy a second computer for backup.
RSF-HA will work on systems running i5/OS V5R2 and later, including the latest V6R1. Prices range in the area of $5,000 per partition, so for source and target machines, users will need to run it in two partitions. Users can buy the basic RSF communications package for about $575 per partition if they don't need high availability.
For additional information, readers can visit http://www.bugbusters.net/ or write to Lesnick at
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