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…
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Zerto on IBM Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Zerto on IBM Cloud protects, expands, and migrates existing VMware vSphere and other hypervisor workloads onto IBM Cloud, in order to provide a secure, flexible, and scalable disaster recovery solution. These single-tenant environments are deployed on IBM Cloud's data centers around the world and provide cloud application recovery in minutes.
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.
If the environment is fully IBM cloud-based with simple infra components like the SQL servers, standard VMs or applications with short recovery time objectives. This cost-effective solution can save in implementing rather than an expensive DR mechanism or tool to support the overall recovery strategy. If you have complex environments where mission-critical apps like Oracle Databases are running in a cluster mode and features like data guard is used this option would not be a good choice due to complexity.
Ease of setup and upgrade. Installation and configuration was a breeze and can get you protected in just minutes without having to set up additional hardware.
Consolidated billing of the IBM infrastructure and Zerto licensing. One bill to pay monthly.
Ease of support access. Contacting IBM Cloud support is quick and easy and they can quickly involve Zerto support if needed.
Enable the ability to use IBM Cloud Object Storage as a target for Zerto's long-term retention feature.
Easier access to the underlying VMware infrastructure would be nice. Right now we have to connect to IBM's VPN and use other tools to do some infrastructure management tasks.
More insight into the IBM-side VMware environment that we replicate to (i.e. ability to see available IPs, etc). Most of that is managed by IBM.
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
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.
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.
We had prior experience with Zerto and we were very happy with how it worked. Rubrik is also a very good product, but we wanted to go with the solution we were most familiar with. Zerto combined with IBM Cloud is a reliable combo that we feel works together well in addressing what we are trying to accomplish.
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.
Overall, it's a very effective solution both from a cost and operational standpoint. We now do DR tests once a quarter rather than once every 6 months.
