Carbonite acquired Double-Take, a data replication and disaster recovery option, in early 2017. The technology now powers Carbonite Availability, the now Carbonite supported high availability and data replication product.
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Precisely Assure MIMIX
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Assure MIMIX from Precisely (formerly Syncsort) offers IBM i high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for companies worldwide, from small businesses to global enterprises, who can use Assure MIMIX to prevent data loss and eliminate planned and unplanned downtime. Assure MIMIX provides scalable real-time replication with options for automating administration, monitoring and alerting, customizable switch automation, and a graphical…
I believe it would work well with continuous replication in a DR scenario with no time limits and having the ability to fail back is a bonus, but in a one off move the decision to restrict the time it can sync for has proven to be an issue for us.
MIMIX is well suited when the organization requires a PLANNED Switch. MIMX will also work for any unplanned switches. However, this is not the most ideal situation and we have had to perform at least once when the older iSeries hardware failed, and the business transactions were on hold, impacting the business. MIMIX support was required to be called upon to assist. We were able to get the new iSeries online within an hour, so thankfully the outage to the business was miminal. It is important that any organization utilizing MIMIX schedule, prepare, and plan for the PLANNED Switch, at least once per year, if not twice per year.
License management is poor and the online system is very restrictive, We are using a one time "Move" product that has a fixed life ... but sometimes in a small team other high priority tasks come along.
We lost all access to all licenses in the portal and all support because we hadn't used them in ninety days. Very poor service. We did get access back eventually but it took a lot of "bargaining".
Failover isn't always as smooth as it could be. VMDKs don't release properly and the move fails and has to be done manually. Not hard just frustrating. VMWare to VMWare.
Cabonite Availability is a very practical and useful tool that can help any business weather any type of IT disaster. The ease and quickness of restoring data helps us provide as seamless an experience as possible. Many times our customers will never know there was an outage. This brings confidence in our brand and improves our organization's standing and reputation.
MIMIX is software built for availability. By its nature it is must be available. As long as the underlying system and communication network are available MIMIX is working. And if there are failures in either of those, MIMIX is designed to allow for a quick and resilient recovery once underly systems or communications are restored
I have never seen MIMIX itself be a performance bottleneck. However it is important to consider the network in overall performance of any remotely replicated systems. MIMIX can only replicate as fast as the network allows. But a strong capability of MIMIX is its ability to "buffer" its replication, so it can be sent without error as the network allows
Once through to support it is very good and they have assisted us through a number of issues. I don't always think that they provide a solution, more a workaround, but in a move situation where each copy is moving once, that isn't an issue. I'd be more concerned if we were using it to manage a DR scenario.
Support is available and efficient. Response time is good and likelyhood of a quick resolutiion is high. However the mature solid product and proactive management tools, fortunately make support requirements relatively rare. The support for version upgrades is also strong, but again the basic upgrade process is usually straightforward and well documented.
Zerto is a very nice tool when performing virtual to virtual replication. If you were to add a physical server in the mix, it would not be able to handle that server or the data on it. Veeam is a way is similar to Zerto where it only has the ability to handle virtual to virtual replication. The big difference is that it's not continuous replication. It uses a snapshot technology to grab the changes from the last snapshot and replicate that over.
Iterra is a less capable "little brother" product to MIMIX. Iterra like MIMIX was acquired by Vision, then subsequent owning organizations, now Precisely. Most of the original core Iterra functionality has been rolled into MIMIX. The Iterra product still exists but in a very limited role. Precisely and the previous owner has been very clear in their recommendation to standardize on MIMIX.
MIMIX works to its intended functionality. It provides real time data replication across multiple partitions and systems as defined. I have never witnessed any problems with MIMIX in scaling to larger systems or adding new data groups. In conjunction with the inherent scalability of IBMi scalability and configuration flexibillity are rather quick and easy.
Having an HA/DR solution in place is viewed as a positive by customers and potential customers for the marketing of the organization's core products and services.
