IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX

Highlights

• PowerHA™ SystemMirror 7.1.1 for AIX®: The next generation of solutions for high availability
• PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 incorporates Cluster Aware AIX 7.1 for integrated topology management
• SAP Hot LiveCache support for fast failover
• New Federated Security for cluster wide security management
• Multichannel cluster communications supports multiple levels of redundancy in most data centers

The need for robust high-availability solutions

A robust, highly available application infrastructure is fundamental in the capability of an IT organization to deliver required service level agreements. The objective behind implementing a high availability solution is to provide near-continuous application availability through both planned and unplanned outages. Business-critical applications are configured into a cluster; this typically involves at least two systems (or nodes); the cluster monitors the critical resources for changes that may indicate a failure, a pending failure or a possible configuration change. The cluster is monitored for health and changes to a configuration within the cluster must be made consistent across the cluster.

IT industry professionals have a general understanding about what a high availability cluster should to do; the question to consider is: how well does a given solution do it. How much effort does it take to maintain cluster health, to conduct a failover operation or to integrate your application into the cluster? A modern high-availability solution not only provides all of the before mentioned solution elements; it also participates within the IT production environment. The modern high-availability solution must coexist seamlessly with the operating system and infrastructure it is supporting. It is for this reason that IBM shifted its strategy to one of deep integration verses a cross platform approach for HA. With PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 Standard Edition, IBM introduced the new strategic PowerHA offering with Cluster Aware AIX (CAA), kernel-based health management and several other technologies designed to provide a more robust HA/DR environment focused on ease of implementation and ease of use.