Highlights
- Introducing PowerHA™ SystemMirror 7.1 for AIX®: The next generation in solutions for high availability
- 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 centers
- Policy-driven resource group and application stack recovery sequencing
The need for robust high-availability solutions
High availability is a key component of Business Resiliency. A robust, highly available application infrastructure is fundamental in the capability 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, 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 high availability cluster should to 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 high-availability solution not only provides all of the before mentioned solution elements, but 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.
