Little periods of downtime may add up for big businesses. According to a 2019 IBM as well as Forrester Consulting poll, scheduled downtime cost businesses $1.5 million, averaging in a single quarter along with $5.6 million overall the year before. Unplanned downtime had an even bigger financial impact than planned downtime, costing an average of 35% more each minute. But now you can avoid those downtimes using IBM DB2 Mirror.
Unfortunately, downtime becomes practically guaranteed due to both scheduled and unscheduled outages. However, you may nearly always keep your company’s vital applications out and running by building zero-downtime solutions. One option for continuous availability is a system built around IBM Db2 Mirror for i, which is compatible with the most recent iterations of the IBMi OS.
What is Db2 by IBM?
The cloud-native database IBM Db2 is designed to support large-scale real-time analytics and low-latency transactions. It gives DBAs, enterprise architects, and developers a single engine to run vital applications, store, and query data, and spur quicker creativity and decision-making throughout your company. Utilising IBM iSeries Db2, which is based on decades of progress in data security, scalability, and availability, you can safeguard, optimise, and withstand your applications as well as analytics anywhere.
Benefits of using IBM DB2
Update vital applications
Run mission-critical apps anywhere, anytime, with integrated, sophisticated security, easy scaling, and continuous availability.
Expand AI and analytics throughout the company
For a unified picture of your artificial intelligence and IT Infrastructure Services, directly integrate alongside Watsonx: Data Lakehouse and share information using open formats.
Protect and manage your data
Make use of Db2’s built-in data masking, access controls, encryption, and other features to protect your most sensitive data in hybrid, on-premise, and cloud environments.
Strong BI and operational analytics
With quick ingest, in-database analytics, and in-memory data processing, you can do operational analysis, providing business intelligence, as well as enable real-time decision-making.
Make your data ecology simpler
With a single, cloud-native engine designed for mixed OLTP as well as OLAP workloads and close connection with your information lake, you can cut expenses and complexity.
IBM Big SQL Db2
With the powerful multimodal, including multi-cloud capabilities of IBM Db2 Big SQL, you can query data spanning cloud data lakes, including Hadoop, using a powerful, massively parallel SQL engine.
Db2 Warehouse by IBM
With the evolution of outsourcing, you can manage mission-critical analytics workloads across all data types ethically and economically. Connect with WatsonX.data to handle large AI tasks from any location.
Elaborating the benefits for businesses
Constant Accessibility
IBM Db2 Mirror for i immediately creates a cluster consisting of two mirrored servers, enabling continuous availability. With this configuration, the underlying Db2 database for your company is accessible from either machine, ensuring that it remains available even in the event that one instance goes down. Applications remain online in the event of outages thanks to this redundancy.
The goal for Recoveration Time
Recovery time objectives, or RTOs, include the time it takes for an application to recover from an outage and quantify how long it may be unavailable without suffering major losses. RTO is nil using IBM DB2.
This essentially implies that if one of the mirror databases goes down, the front end of your program won’t be affected. As a result, users will be allowed to use your program uninterruptedly and continue as usual.
Continuous Updates
Db2 Mirror for IBM iSeries lets you keep operating critical applications while one among the mirror databases is down due to planned maintenance that necessitates downtime.
You must shut down the node you want to update before you can carry out a rolling upgrade next; while the initial node updates, the additional node should be assigned the task of monitoring any changes that take place. Certain events, including modifications to a user’s profile, will be monitored in this way.
The roles will switch after the first node is done, and the modification should be carried out again on the subsequent node. Eventually, your system will synchronise when you resume mirroring.
Avoiding Downtime to Maintain Business Continuity
Creating a zero-downtime system for IBM Db2 Mirror on i is just one approach for making sure that operations continue even in the case of an interruption. Putting in place adaptable disaster prevention and recovery systems is another aspect of resilience planning.
Regular backups, as well as storage snapshots, are the first steps in separating data while keeping places that are conveniently accessible. It’s also critical that your company can promptly restore such backups in the IT Infrastructure Services.
Another essential component of resilience is automation. Your mission-critical systems can react to emergencies as fast as feasible if you automate backups, disaster response procedures, and recovery work.
Data on IBM i can have continuous availability thanks to IBM® Db2® Mirror for i. This approach reduces or eliminates frequent downtime windows by enabling Db2 with i content to be available across two distinct LPARs.
There are a bunch of other use cases that you should think about in order to see how this technology may provide your business an edge.
Synopsis of Technology
5770DBM is the licensed program package for Db2 Mirror over i. While you explore IBM DB2 Mirror, you may need to analyse a number of software, application, disaster restoration, and hardware factors. A summary of Db2 Mirror’s features, applications, and minimal hardware requirements is given in this section.
Application Framework
The data is copied synchronously across the nodes within a Db2 Mirror setup. The application design will determine the recovery point objectives and recovery time for your users.
Db2 Mirror overall benefits
Db2 Mirror is simple to use and implement. The fact that synchronous replication maintains the two nodes’ identicality is mostly hidden from users and applications.
One of the nodes may be used to execute your application, while the other is kept in active idle mode and has access to real-time production data. The term “active/passive environment” describes this. With Db2 Mirror, there is a readily accessible replica of the generation of data on the additional node in case your company needs to analyse data in real time. One of the nodes may be used for your production environment, while the other can be used for business intelligence and real-time queries without affecting the production node’s performance.
You may spread users and apps among the nodes to achieve load balancing. An active/active environment is what we term this. Users on both of the nodes receive the same data since changes to the duplicated data happen synchronously. To guarantee the integrity of modifications made between nodes, locking is incorporated across the IBM® i OS. User and application traffic can be diverted to the active node in the event that a node becomes unavailable.
You will observe a decrease in production downtime owing to outages in each of these scenarios, provided that no application modifications are made.
Any downtime necessary to carry out system or application upkeep is one of the regular pain points in a production environment. Planned IPLs and upgrades can cause production disruptions. Db2 Mirror helps lessen and sometimes eliminate these interruptions. One node can go on handling transactions while another one is IPLed or servicing is performed thanks to the ability to momentarily halt replication. The changes that the currently connected node has monitored are pushed through the second node to restore the consistency of the database files when the IPL is over and the connection has been restored between the nodes.
With the evolution of outsourcing, replication may then be stopped once more, and the initial node can be IPLed or maintained to reverse the process.
Conclusion
These are the benefits of IBM DB2 Mirror for i Series and AS400. Now that you know the perks, you can better implement them for your business by contacting Megamax Services.
