Robot HA

With customers demanding access to your systems and services around the clock, companies today can’t afford any downtime. If your competitor is open for business while you are not, you could be losing out. So, you must be prepared to dodge downtime, whether it comes as part of planned maintenance or unplanned production failures. Robot HA is a software-based high availability solution that allows you to replicate your important data and keep business running even when your production environment goes down.

Protect Business During Disasters

Among IBM i shops, over 72 percent run more than half of their core business on IBM i. However, 53 percent still rely on recovering from tape. Recovery from tape can take days before business applications are up and running after a production failure. Such a lengthy outage can have serious consequences on your business.

Software-based replication is more flexible than hardware-based replication, allowing you to recover more quickly from any unplanned switches. Robot HA can cut recovery times down to minutes by making a fast, unplanned switch to a target system, ideally at a remote location. Typical recovery time objective (RTO) is between 15 and 30 minutes.

Make Planned Maintenance More Productive

Nightly tape backups, application maintenance, software updates, hardware upgrades, operating system upgrades, and other maintenance activities also introduce downtime that can put your business at risk. Robot HA allows tape backups to take place reliably from the target system without introducing downtime on production. It also allows you to upgrade the target system first and run with it for as long as you need to make sure it’s safe before upgrading the production operating system.

If you need dedicated access to production for maintenance, a planned role swap allows users to be temporarily switched to the target system. When maintenance tasks are complete on production, another planned role swap takes place, restoring users and data back to production with minimal downtime.

Robot HA offers a one-to-many connection capability – allowing you to have an additional backup system that cannot be swapped to where users can perform BI, testing, or other IO intense activities. By offloading some of these activities to another backup, you can preserve the speed and performance of your production machine.

Avoid Data Loss

Remote journaling-based replication has become the most trusted method of transporting data from production to target. Robot HA can replicate hundreds of millions of journal transactions per hour over any distance without consuming excessive communications bandwidth or introducing latency. A highly efficient apply routine on the target system applies data the moment it is received, which means that your target system is always a real-time copy of production. During a production failure, users switch to the target system and continue using business applications from the last transaction entered on production before the failure.

Migrate Data On-Prem or to the Cloud

Looking to modernize or consolidate your servers, reorganize your storage, or incorporate cloud technology into your data center? You’ll need a tool to safely and swiftly migrate your irreplaceable IBM i data from your current system to the new target. Local and remote journaling software is the easiest way to accomplish a side-by-side or distance migration while continuing your day-to-day operations and keeping the new environment in sync with your old server.

There’s no risk with Robot HA. You can create an initial copy of your original data, send it to the new target, and run in this side-by-side mode until you feel comfortable making the switch. Robot HA keeps your two systems in sync the whole time, and you can revert back to your original production server at any time without data loss.

Be Ready for Role Swaps

A role swap is an automated process that quickly prepares the backup or target system to take on the role of production and then automatically switches users. The audit routines in Robot HA continuously examine the target database and objects and compare them with production. This ensures that the target system is a true and ready-to-use copy of production.

You can also monitor the health of your Robot HA pairs with a modern, browser-based dashboard, which color codes any errors, including transfer lag time, apply lag time, or audit errors.

In addition, Fortra is the expert in IBM i automation. We’re uniquely qualified to help you through your first role swaps.  The first step is for customers to begin using our role swap while active and the second step is the full role swap. Our process automates switching your data access and putting in place the system configurations you need to run your business from the switched system.  Role swaps can be performed for partitions on premise or in the cloud – since many customers are considering having their DR partitions hosted in public or private clouds.

Keep Costs Down, Realize Greater ROI

Robot HA is frugal with your resources, so there’s no need to order excessive disk storage or memory. Data transport is achieved over exceptionally long distances without the need for excessive communications bandwidth, extra hardware, or compromises to recovery time objective (RTO) or recovery point objective (RPO). Robot HA uses an interval process of grabbing net new objects based on object changed dates instead of relying on the IBM security journal (QAUDJRN) like other HA tools, which means it is less taxing on your production environment.  The security journal is used for some things like authority, profile, systems values, spool files, etc. This is done in an interval process as well.

In short, Robot HA is designed to provide maximum levels of availability, recoverability, and flexibility. The design ensures the most efficient use of hardware and communications infrastructure and the lowest burden on your team, providing the best ROI in the industry for high availability and disaster recovery.

Install with Ease

Robot HA is quick to install and easy to use. Data is synchronized, users are trained, and a role swap test is performed to make sure people and processes are ready. With Robot HA’s Robot GUIDE, you can have Robot HA up and running in a matter of minutes. All you have to do is enter the license code to initiate deployment and identify the backup source system in order to secure business continuity for your organization.

You can take advantage of our Comprehensive Implementation services package, which includes pre-installation planning, product installation, implementation, basic training on the product, and a role swap while active during business hours.