MIMIX® V4 Availability Management

MIMIX Availability Management for AS/400 is a new standard in the industry providing leading edge technology and innovation in availability management. Included in MIMIX are significant advancements in Ease of Operations, Data Integrity, Performance and Flexibility.

E-business, ERP solutions, business intelligence, and virtual organizations have created a new requirement for organizations - keeping applications and data available for users around the clock. In today's business environment, this has become a necessity, not a luxury. System reliability is not enough, and managing planned and unplanned downtime has become a corporate directive and significant issue for IT departments.

MIMIX for AS/400 is an Availability Management Solution that enables organizations to provide consistent, predictable access to the applications and data their businesses require. Implementing MIMIX virtually eliminates downtime from planned events such as nightly backups, software or hardware upgrades, and database reorganizations, and from unplanned events such as server failure, fire, floods and power outages to provide your business with the power of information availability.

MIMIX Replicator for AS/400 creates and maintains one or more exact copies of a production AS/400 including applications, configurations, spooled files and databases. Changes are replicated in real-time from one AS/400 to one or more target AS/400s, so that a viable system with the most current information is always available when planned maintenance or unplanned outages bring down a production system. MIMIX Replicator also supports intra-system replication for testing, backups, or development purposes.

MIMIX Monitor for AS/400 provides the framework for continuously monitoring your AS/400 systems for specific events or conditions and responding to those conditions. In the event of an outage, MIMIX Replicator in conjunction with MIMIX Monitor can automatically switch users to the backup system for non-interrupted processing. MIMIX Monitor includes pre-packaged monitor programs for checking the power levels in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and TCP/IP address impersonation for increased availability, as well as the flexibility to monitor most items on the AS/400 on an interval basis, scheduled basis, or continuously. MIMIX Monitor makes the IT manager's job easier by centralizing these monitor functions.

MIMIX is the standard in the industry, providing leading-edge technology, innovation and unsurpassed quality in availability management. MIMIX delivers ease-of-operations, performance and flexibility that makes availability management practical for a wide range of applications and needs. Coupled with support for AS/400 LPAR, application specific support for SAP and MQSeries, and a worldwide service and support network, MIMIX is the confident choice for Availability Management.

In the fourth generation of its evolution, MIMIX has earned a reputation for high performance with minimal CPU overhead. ILE-C, OS/400 API, and MI (AS/400 Machine Interface) instructions allow top transmission speed when sending and receiving information.

Ease of Operations
All MIMIX components are integrated to provide significant ease-of-use benefits. Shared product libraries, configuration elements, message logs and other elements greatly simplify implementation and ongoing management of the availability management environment.

Assured Data Integrity
MIMIX Data Doctor is a collection of features which automatically diagnose and repair files to ensure data integrity. These features provide automation for collision resolution, reduced failed entries, and file synchronization, correcting data issues common in file sharing environments before they affect system productivity. Data collisions occur when specific data is simultaneously modified at more than one location in a file sharing environment. The collision resolution feature automatically fixes collision situations where files might normally be placed on hold, providing continual synchronization of highly active files. Data Doctor's retry feature ensures replication even when objects to be replicated are in use by another application.

Data Doctor synchronizes files between the production and backup system without taking the files out of production for extended periods of time. Comprehensive synchronization checks built into MIMIX Replicator include the flexibility to check synchronization of the production and backup systems by relative record number or keyed replication. MIMIX Replicator conforms to DB2/400 rules, and verifies correct file placement, that updated or deleted records are in the target database, and that records written do not violate unique key conditions. Additional command functionality is available for synchronization checking at the file, member, and data level. For convenience these additional command synchronization checks can be programmed to run at predefined intervals.

Industry Leading Performance Adaptive Caching is a MIMIX exclusive used to heuristically determine upcoming data requests and notify OS/400 in advance so that the data can be cached into memory to minimize DASD bottlenecks and streamline access. MIMIX Replicator adapts to changes in the replication data to continually optimize hits in the cache. This new capability can be optionally selected by users in order to optimize the tradeoff between memory use and throughput. Through Adaptive Caching, MIMIX Replicator supports the highest AS/400 transaction volume environments and utilizes the latest technology to ensure absolute minimal overhead.

MIMIX automatically manages multi-threaded asynchronous jobs for automatic load leveling. During peak periods, MIMIX Replicator detects the need for additional parallelism and automatically starts temporary jobs to meet the short-term demand. Once this demand has diminished, these temporary jobs are removed to minimize CPU overhead.

Flexibility for all Environments MIMIX is highly adaptable and is capable of supporting virtually any customer environment. MIMIX Replicator products use the concept of a "data group" to manage the entire replication process. Data groups are logical groups consisting of data files, applications, libraries, data areas, objects or a combination of these items that represents a unit of work during the replication process. Since the direction of replication is defined at a data group level, the roles of servers as primary or secondary servers within a cluster can be unique for specific applications. For example, one application (data group) can replicate from system A to system B, while another application replicates from system B to system A.

Furthermore, MIMIX can support a wide range of clustering topologies ranging from simple one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many, cascading, two-tier and three-tier. All replication and role-swapping is defined and controlled at the data group level thereby providing enormous flexibility and adaptability. This flexibility allows companies to make optimum use of their entire AS/400 cluster without having to make changes to applications or their environment.