Ensuring Software Availability with Rocket iCluster 8.4

September 22, 2022

Ensuring Software Availability with Rocket iCluster 8.4

With a growing number of businesses moving to hybrid cloud models, in January 2022, IBM announced users would be able to acquire a virtual serial number and assign it to a Logical Partition (LPAR). Thanks to IBM’s Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), IBM i software can now be licensed per partion instead of being tied to a physical location. The move to UUID gives administrators more flexibility by providing them with Live Partition Mobility (LPM)—the ability to move running partitions from one server to another—and Simplified Remote Restart (SRR), which lets users move down LPARs and quickly get them up and running on another server.

How to Manage Already Licensed IBM i Applications

The increased use of cloud servers within hybrid operations have left organizations that leverage IBM i software with traditional licensing mechanisms vulnerable to a loss of licensing, data and software availability. Technology with physical serial numbers lack the flexibility to move from server to server while maintaining licensing. To combat this, IBM created its UUID as an attribute for each LPAR. In other words, the UUID allows businesses to license applications independently from the serial number of their server hardware, ensuring the UUID does not change during planned LPM or SRR migration.

Maximizing IBM i Applications & Data Availability With iCluster 8.4

Thanks to the flexibility of IBM i’s UUID licensing, businesses can now leverage powerful replication tools like Rocket Software’s iCluster® newest 8.4 version to protect themselves from unexpected events and complete tasks from a secondary system—ensuring operations stay online and uninterrupted for end users. It’s replication software acts as a safety valve for businesses, ensuring continuity and high availability of their most critical applications and data.

Rocket iCluster 8.4 is one of the first UUID-compatible disaster recovery solutions of its kind, supporting both traditional mainframe serial number-based and UUID licensing mechanisms. With the High Availability Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) iCluster software, businesses can maximize the security and availability of their IBM i applications and data by reducing downtime related to any use case, including unexpected system interruptions.

iCluster provides real-time, fault-tolerant, object-level replication. This allows teams to bring a "warm" mirror of a clustered IBM i system into service within minutes of an unpredicted outage. By giving businesses concurrent access to both master and replicated data, iCluster ensures environments remain available to teams and allows them to offload critical business tasks—like running reports, Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) data extraction, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) communications and more—from a secondary system without affecting the performance of the primary system.

Aside from the Rocket iCluster 8.4 UUID connectivity, iCluster 8.4 provides proactive issue notifications and self-correction to help teams identify and address potential issues before they affect LPAR availability or the recovery solution.

For more details on the Rocket iCluster 8.4 update, visit the product release notes.

To learn more about Rocket iCluster and get a quote, click here.