High availability technologies
Whether you need high availability for your business applications or are looking to reduce the amount of time it takes to perform daily backups, IBM® i high availability technologies provide the infrastructure and tools to help achieve your goals.
All IBM PowerHA® SystemMirror® for i technologies, as well as some
Business Partner high availability products, are built on IBM i cluster resource services, or more simply clusters. Cluster
provides the underlying infrastructure that allows resilient resources, such as data, devices and
applications, to be automatically or manually switched between systems. It provides failure
detection and response, so that in the event of an outage, cluster resource services responds
accordingly, keeping your data safe and your business operational.
The other key technology that is used by PowerHA technologies is independent disk pools. Independent disk
pools allow data and applications be stored on disks that might or might not be present when the
system is operational. When independent disk pools are a part of a cluster, the data and
applications that are stored within them can be switched to other systems or logical partitions.
There are several different technologies that are based on independent disk pools, including
switched disks, geographic mirroring, Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, and DS8000®
HyperSwap® with independent auxiliary storage pools
(IASPs). Determining which technology to base your high availability solution upon depends on
several factors. The topic, High availability overview, provides a high-level comparison of these
technologies along with criteria that you can use to determine which technologies are most suited
for your needs.
In IBM Knowledge Center, the terms IASP and
independent disk pool are synonymous.
This topic provides descriptions of key high availability technologies, their associated concepts, and describes the different high availability management interfaces that are supported by IBM i systems.
- What's new for IBM i 7.2
Read about new or changed information for the High availability technologies topic collection. - PDF file for High availability technologies
You can view and print a PDF file of this information. - IBM i Cluster technology
As companies strive to compete in today's environment, high availability has become essential to many businesses. The IBM i cluster technology can be used to achieve high availability in IBM i environments. Cluster technology provides mechanisms that enable critical resources to be automatically available on backup systems. Those resources could include data, application programs, devices, or environment attributes. - Advanced node failure detection
Advanced node failure detection function is provided which can be used to reduce the number of failure scenarios which result in cluster partitions. - Cluster administrative domain
A cluster administrative domain provides a mechanism of maintaining a consistent operational environment across cluster nodes within an IBM i high availability environment. A cluster administrative domain ensures that highly available applications and data behave as expected when switched to or failed over to backup nodes. - PowerHA data replication technologies
PowerHA offers several different technologies for data replication. These technologies can be used separately or sometimes combined to provide a higher level of protection against outages. - High availability management
To plan, configure, and manage a complete high availability solution requires a set of management tools and offerings. With IBM i systems, several choices exist for high availability management. - Related information for High availability technologies
Product manuals, IBM Redbooks® publications, websites, and other information center topic collections contain information that relates to the High availability topic collection. You also can find related information about implementing independent disk pools, PowerHA technologies, and disaster recovery. You can view or print any of the PDF files. - Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC)
Resource Monitoring and Control (RMC) is a generalized framework for managing, monitoring, and manipulating resources such as physical or logical system entities.