IBM PowerHA for AIX (HACMP)

Highlights

• Help protect critical business applications from outages; planned or unplanned
• Extend failover to backup resources at remote sites using optional PowerHA™/XD support for asynchronous mode for GLVM or for Global Mirroring on SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
• Take advantage of increased security characteristics and compliance through support of IPV6 for client access to your PowerHA for AIX cluster

Need for high availability and disaster recovery
Throughout the day—often 24 hours a day-IT systems are hard at work. But what happens when the systems or applications are not available? It is widely documented that outages increase the total cost of IT ownership as well as causing potential damage to client relationships. Although hardware has become very reliable, research shows that unplanned outages occur and typically result from operator error, software bugs, environmental conditions and other non hardware related situations—problems that reliable hardware cannot prevent. Planned outages for application and system maintenance impact business performance and businesses are aggressively shrinking the time allotted for this type of activity. And finally is the issue of disaster recovery. Increasingly IT shops are moving away from outsourced DR operations to in-sourced DR operations. The motivation is basic economics; modern DR solutions require continuous replication of production data to a remote location and this requires dedicated resources. The simple fact is that owning your own DR solution is not only economically sensible but it gives you greater control of your own environment. The two key requirements associated with disaster recovery are recovery point objective (RPO) and geographic dispersion. GLVM async mode and Global Mirror give you unlimited geographic dispersion with minimal impact on the performance of the application and data you are protecting.

IBM's premier availability solution
IBM PowerHA for AIX® (formerly High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing – HACMP™) helps protect critical business applications from outages; planned or unplanned. For over a decade, the PowerHA for AIX solution has provided reliable monitoring, failure detection and automated recovery of business application environments to backup resources, exploiting IBM’s suite of disk storage solutions which provide the core data resiliency foundation. IBM developers invent, deploy, integrate and test to refine the usability and robustness of PowerHA for AIX. Release 5.5.0 exemplifies this commitment to excellence.

IP version 6 (IPV6) is the follow on version of the IPV4 Internet Protocol. It has better security characteristics and has been mandated by the U.S. Federal Government for products to be purchased by government agencies. PowerHA for AIX (V5.5.0) now enables a client to connect to the PowerHA cluster via IPV6.

PowerHA can be configured to react to hundreds of system events, including problems that are not severe enough to interrupt proper system operation (such as process failure or exhaustion of system resources). PowerHA monitors, detects and reacts to such conditions, maintaining service availability during random, unexpected software problems. Up to 32 nodes running the AIX operating system (OS), or up to eight nodes running the Linux® OS, can participate in a PowerHA cluster, making it ideal for environments requiring rock-solid availability. PowerHA runs in AIX environments (and additionally in IBM i environments) and leverages IBM PowerVM™ virtualization capabilities by dynamically increasing system resources to accommodate takeover workloads as well as live partition mobility. When running in a small micro-partition on a backup server, it enables the automatic increase in system resources to accommodate the primary application in the event of a failover. When running in a live partition mobility scenario, PowerHA for AIX moves with the automated migration environment! The PowerHA for AIX solution can virtually eliminate planned outages by transferring users, applications and data to backup systems during scheduled maintenance.

PowerHA V5.4 supports Linux, extending many of its robust capabilities and heritage to the Linux environment. Support for Linux will include the base capabilities for reliable monitoring and failure detection available for AIX.