IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX

Highlights of PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX 6.1

• Introducing PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Standard Edition and PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise Edition.
• PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Standard Edition is the IBM Power Systems data center solution that helps protect critical business applications from outages; planned or unplanned.
• PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise Edition includes the Standard Edition plus advanced capabilities such as failover to backup resources at remote locations.
• PowerHA SystemMirror Enterprise Edition supports High Availability and Disaster Recovery with EMC SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) deployments.
• GLVM configuration wizard enables PowerHA SystemMirror Enterprise Edition clients to set up a two-node cross site configuration for disaster recovery.
• PowerHA SystemMirror deployed in DLPAR (dynamic logical partitioning) environments enables managed utilization of resources on a secondary node in the PowerHA SystemMirror cluster for POWER5™ and later processors.
• PowerHA SystemMirror product is compliant for IPv6 environments.

Other enhancements include: Improved SMIT interfaces and File Collections enhancements

The need for robust high availability and disaster recovery solutions
High Availability is a key component of Business Resiliency. It's widely documented that outages increase the total cost of IT ownership as well as causing potential damage to client relationships and loss of revenue. 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 also impact business performance and businesses are aggressively shrinking the time allotted for this type of activity. Increasingly IT shops are moving away from outsourced DR operations to in-sourced DR operations based on continuous data replication between geographically dispersed locations. Modern DR solutions require both geographic dispersion and recovery point objectives as close to zero as possible. Increasingly, IT shops are being asked to prove that they can indeed recover operations at a remote facility. The simple fact is that owning your own DR solution is not only economically sensible but it gives you greater control over your environment. Finally, the IBM Power Systems™ strategy is to not only deliver more advanced functional capabilities for business resiliency but to enhance product usability and robustness through deep integration with AIX® and affiliated software stack technologies. PowerHA™ SystemMirror™ is architected by, developed by, integrated by, tested and supported by, IBM top to bottom.