IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX

Highlights

• Introducing PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 for AIX: The next generation in solutions for high availability (HA)
• PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 incorporates Cluster Aware AIX 7.1 for integrated topology management
• New PowerHA SystemMirror Management interface in Director
• New Smart Assists for out-of-the-box HA deployment and management for many popular applications
• Multichannel cluster communications supports multiple levels of redundancy in most data centres
• Policy-driven resource group and application stack recovery sequencing.

The need for robust HA solutions

HA is a key component of Business Resiliency. A robust, highly available application infrastructure is fundamental in the capability to deliver required service level agreements (SLAs). The objective behind implementing a HA solution is to provide near-continuous application availability through both planned and unplanned outages. Business critical applications are configured into a cluster, which 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 HA cluster should do; the question to consider is: how well does a given solution approach 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 HA solution not only provides all of the before mentioned solution elements, but it also participates within the IT production environment. The modern HA solution must coexist seamlessly with the operating system (OS) and infrastructure it is supporting.

IBM’s premier UNIX® HA solution

PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 represents the next generation of solutions for HA. This offering takes clustering technology to a new level that will enable our customers to be more productive while enjoying a more robust and easier-to-manage clustering environment.

The IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Standard Edition is based upon Cluster Aware AIX. It features a new Director-based management interface, a new set of Smart Assists (including one for SAP) and a number of other enhancements that will make the solution more robust and self managing. IBM intends to enhance PowerHA SystemMirror Enterprise Edition to exploit AIX cluster-aware technologies for multi-site deployments. The PowerHA SystemMirror 6.1 Enterprise Edition has been enhanced to include support for the IBM DS8000 Global Mirror function as well as Hitachi Truecopy.

PowerHA SystemMirror monitors numerous soft and hard errors within the cluster from various event sources, including problems that are severe enough to immobilise the system (such as a process failure or exhaustion of system resources). With PowerHA 7.1, monitoring and event management have been moved into the kernel of the OS, which provides a robust foundation not prone to job scheduling issues or other events related to OS operations. Cluster awareness enables OS based functions to operate harmoniously with PowerHA. PowerHA SystemMirror is integrated with cluster-aware AIX and exploits the OS features by extending them across the cluster, enabling efficient centralised management.

PowerHA 7.1 comes with a no-charge Director based management interface plug-in. This graphical interface makes cluster management simpler and more productive by providing a secure, centralised point of operations. An administrator can readily deploy clusters and resource groups using the associated wizard. It provides live updates by graphically displaying the status of resource groups, nodes, sites and clusters. With a single view you can see the health of the entire enterprise at a glance.

PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1 provides support for the Smart Assists for easier, out-of-the-box HA setup and application management for many well-known middleware products. The smart assists are HA agents for application deployment and management. Smart Assists are used to define HA policies and also to discover software that is deployed within the cluster. Discovery based information aids in defining the HA policy and provides periodic health monitoring, enabling middleware and resource dependencies to be restarted via the specified policy. With PowerHA SystemMirror 7.1, the smart assist portfolio, in addition to supporting DB2, WebSphere and Oracle, has been enhanced to provide support for SAP, Enterprise Content Manager, TSM, Lotus Domino Server, IBM Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), IBM HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) and printers.

PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise Edition

The PowerHA SystemMirror 6.1 Enterprise Edition package enables you to extend your data centre solution across multiple sites and with 6.1 of PowerHA SystemMirror, the Enterprise Edition expands HA/Disaster Recovery (DR) support to include DS8700 Global Mirror and Hitachi Truecopy.

The Enterprise Edition is essential for clients who must protect themselves from site-wide failures or large-scale disasters. Business-critical data is replicated across multiple sites and the Enterprise Edition enables automated failover to these remote locations. This applies to businesses of any size with multiple sites, regional operations or wherever decentralisation of data is desired. The Enterprise Edition offers multiple technologies for achieving long distance data mirroring, failover and resynchronisation.

• The Enterprise Edition with the Geographic Logical Volume Manager (GLVM) component provides host-based synchronous and asynchronous data replication and failover to remote sites. Users deployed with the Standard Edition can readily expand capabilities with the Enterprise Edition to deploy a highly resilient, geographically dispersed environment. You can economically deploy your own in-house DR solution with the GLVM configuration wizard. Note that GLVM data replication is not dependent on the storage subsystem capabilities and hence is suitable for storage that is not capable of replicating on its own
• The Enterprise Edition supports Storage System DS8700 and SVC with either Metro Mirror or Global Mirror, enabling automatic failover between geographically dispersed data centres. By automating the management of Global Mirror, recovery time is minimised after an outage, regardless of whether the clustered environment is local or geographically dispersed. The Enterprise Edition, in combination with Global Mirror or Metro Mirror, manages a clustered environment to allow mirroring of critical data to be maintained at all times
• The PowerHA SystemMirror 6.1 Enterprise Edition also supports EMC SRDF and Hitachi TrueCopy for HA and DR operations. Customers can use the PowerHA SystemMirror Systems Management Interface Tool (SMIT) interfaces to specify and manage EMC SRDF or Hitachi Truecopy volumes as part of the failover operations and PowerHA SystemMirror uses the SRDF and Truecopy interfaces to discover and manage the replication as part of the HA management solution.

PowerHA SystemMirror also provides integrated support with campus-level failover for Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), IBM System Storage (DS6000 and DS8000) and Storage Area Network (SAN) Volume Controller (SVC) Metro-Mirror peers and failover for IP-connected peers using the native synchronous mode LVM AIX mirroring technology (campus level hyper swap). When PowerHA SystemMirror detects a failure, it can quickly and automatically take action to restore the application, restarting it on a remote redundant system.