One of my first jobs in this industry required me, in addition to my programming duties, to perform a daily backup of our AS/400 B40. My boss and I took turns coming in early every day to load our reel-to-reel tape, restrict the system, and back up our databases. For various reasons, we couldn’t run our backups at night or save the data to Save files. To make matters worse, Save While Active hadn’t yet been introduced, so I had to get to work early in the morning to load a tape and start the backup. Being late meant that all the users had an extended coffee break while I pleaded with the machine to go “Faster! Faster!” I hated doing backups.
Since then, backups have always bugged me. It’s difficult to perform backups and at the same time ensure that the AS/400 is accessible to users. Every company deals with this problem at least weekly if not daily. As the world becomes more tightly integrated with electronic commerce and as we come to depend on computers more and more, we force our systems to maintain a level of high availability that, heretofore, was unnecessary.
Please State the Nature of Your Emergency
In the recent past, say seven to 10 years ago, few AS/400s required 24/7 availability. Usually, those systems were in a “mission-critical” environment, such as a 911 center. Few other industries required this level of availability, and the actual processing those businesses did during the night or on the weekend was a mere shadow of the normal daily routine. The business paradigm was structured such that, except for those businesses with systems supporting multiple time zones and worldwide locations, no one even thought of doing business at night or on the weekends. Think about that for a second. As recently as a decade ago, our business processes were modeled after those found in Mayberry
R.F.D. Stores closed at 5:00 p.m., and sidewalks rolled up an hour later. Sure, we had a lot of visionaries then who foresaw a future in which 24-hour-a-day retailing would be common, but the technology did not exist to make that a reality.
All that has changed. In today’s world of e-commerce, businesses use their Internet-connected AS/400s to display vibrant online catalogs with animation and music to consumers worldwide. As technology has changed, our business practices have changed, and what used to be a rarity, selling during nontraditional business hours, has become the norm. Our AS/400s must be up and running continuously. To assist you in this rapidly
changing world, IBM and its Business Partners (BPs) have developed another new technology.
A Cluster of New Technology
In the February V4R4 announcements, IBM touted its new AS/400 cluster technology. With cluster technology, IBM has developed a set of key functions and interfaces necessary to synchronize and manage multiple AS/400e servers. This new technology even allows for IP address takeover functions so that you can keep your Internet apps running without interruption! In plain English, this means that when one of your AS/400s goes down for any reason (maintenance, scheduled backup, hardware failure), your “standby” system picks up the ball and keeps the business running, without human intervention and without interruption to your users.
In the past, technologies such as RAID5, mirroring, and data propagation provided a means for keeping your users up and running when a system went down. Unfortunately, these methods weren’t perfect; they required a certain amount of overhead for data replication and synchronization, and online users were forced to sign off and then back on when a system went down.
By using a combination of cluster technology, IBM’s OptiConnect product, and data replication software, you can provide your company and your customers with a high- availability system that will keep running regardless of what happens to any single AS/400 within the cluster. OptiConnect, a distributed operations functions hardware/ software technology, uses a shared bus and fiber-optic lines to allow connected AS/400s to continuously transfer data at speeds of up to 1,063 megabits per second (Mbps). Data replication software is available from IBM BPs such as DataMirror, Lakeview Technology, and Vision Solutions.
Added Benefits
Cluster technology requires your shop to own more than one AS/400 server, but that cost could be easily recovered by the sales your business won’t be losing when an AS/400 must be down for maintenance, backup, or repairs. Using OptiConnect and data replication software, you can even use the secondary systems to allow your users to run queries or to run other applications that are perhaps processor-intensive but don’t require database updates.
As you can see, even the subsidiary benefits of cluster technology can help your business in ways you may not imagine at first. The next time your system is offline while you are doing a system backup, consider the business you may be losing when your customers cannot get to your data. Cluster technology along with OptiConnect and data replication software can keep your information flowing, your customers online, and your accounting ledger in the black.
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