True iSeries high availability (HA) is a process of mirroring objects in real-time between two or more iSeries machines. It's also having the ability to switch quickly from one machine to another in the event of a disaster or system failure or during system maintenance tasks, such as hardware and OS upgrades. Implementing HA consists of designating a second iSeries machine as a backup system, enabling communication between it and the production machine, and then implementing programs that replicate changes to critical objects from the production system to a backup system.
During a system failure, disaster, or system-maintenance event, users are moved to the second, mirror-image machine using a process known as a "switchover" or "role swap," thus allowing business to resume on the backup with little or no loss of data.
Needless to say, it's critical to have a monitoring and continual-auditing process that ensures replication integrity. If your high availability software does not monitor and fix replication errors reliably and in real-time, the backup system is compromised.
Some HA products provide reports that operators can review to discover and then manually correct objects that are out of synchronization. Other HA products automatically detect out-of-synchronization conditions and automatically resynchronize objects by copying the entire object to the backup system. iTera has introduced a revolutionary process that moves the discovery/correction process a quantum leap forward.
iTera's Echo2 High Availability release 4.2 incorporates a new patent-pending technology called CACHe2 (Concurrent Audit Concurrent Heal for Echo2). This unique technology not only detects out-of-synchronization conditions, but also dramatically reduces the delay between the discovery of a data integrity problem and its resolution. CACHe2 is an autonomic technology that discovers and corrects data integrity problems in real-time at the record level. This eliminates the need to resynchronize entire objects when an out-of-synchronization condition is detected, which significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to correct that condition and the amount of system resources and communication traffic normally required by the HA software.
For more information about Echo2 High Availability and CACHe2 technology, visit iTera or call 800-957-4511.
Check out iTera's other system availability offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.
Dale Porter is the chief high availability development architect at iTera, Inc., a leading provider of high availability and disaster/recovery solutions in the iSeries world and the developer of Echo2 High Availability. For more information about iTera call 801.799.0300. To contact Dale, send an email to
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