HA4i Improvements

We are constantly improving our products and have recently pushed a number of significant changes through for our HA4i product. One area we are always looking for improvements is in the audit process and the recent releases have included a number of enhancements related to audits. Another area is object coverage, we had one significant gap in our coverage for objects which the recent updates have added coverage for which is the DLO file system. All of these updates are available for download from our website via a *SAVF which can be downloaded and restored over the existing objects.

DLO Coverage

The DLO file system is something which was left over from the Office Vision days and is still used by a few applications. Previously we had not been seeing any requests for DLO coverage but had noticed the noise level from our competitors was rising and using our lack of coverage as a reason for not picking HA4i as a viable High Availability Solution.  So we have now implemented a fully functional DLO replication process which ensures your DLO file system is kept in sync. As a side note, we did not add specific DLO audit commands as the DLO file system can be adequately audited using the same process used for the IFS. So if you have a need for DLO coverage HA4i is now capable of fulfilling that need.

Audits

The audits are a safeguard against configuration errors plus ensure HA4i is doing its job properly, they allow the users to verify that when a switch is required the objects they expect to be in sync are. This is one area where HA4i stands out by providing fast and efficient audit processes for all of the objects it covers for replication. We have added a number of new features to the IFS audits which ensure the IFS is correctly managed after a switch plus added a number of additional attribute checks. As always we find a number of features which cause problems in the audits to be flagged which are not necessarily an issue, we have updated the code to remove the ambiguity caused by these mismatches.

Commit Cycle management

A design feature in HA4i which makes it very fast and efficient in terms of applying journal data causes issues when a role-swap occurs due to an unplanned outage. The applying of data is done without consideration for the commit cycle so if an abnormal end occurred we could have open commit cycles that have had some data already applied to the database on the target system. To resolve this we have added a new command which will go through the journal and identify if there are any open commit cycles, if any are found it will remove the data associated with those open commit cycles ensuring data integrity is preserved.

Systems Management

Ensuring the replication processes are running and resource utilization is kept to a minimum is an important part of a High Availability Solution, we are therefore constantly looking at how we can improve the activities within HA4i to ensure they need as little user intervention as possible. An important tool provided with HA4i is the STATUSCHK command which can be run automatically via a JOBSCDE to verifiy that HA4i is up and running and any problems are reported to the users. The recent release has seen a number of improvements for STATUSCHK.

• Verification that DB sync requests are actually in the SYNCMGR queue
• Remote system alive check to ensure the remote system responds to a ping
• Improved report content

Other enhancements in this area include a new command that will clean up any journal receivers on the system not just those being managed via the apply process. A new command allows the private authorities to be verified between systems and any anomolies will be corrected automatically. When a change management process runs they sometimes rename the library while they update the content, this means the new library was not included in the replication so the content changes would be missed. HA4i will now pick up a library rename and ensure the configuration objects are updated to reflect the library needs to have its content replicated. The process of building a remote journal environment can be challenging to some so the BLDRJENV command was provided to allow the RJ environment to be built from source to target, its has now been improved to allow the complete environment to be built from source to target and target back to source.

We are constantly striving to keep HA4i current and useful, if you have any requests for additional features or updates to current ones you can always log a request via the support portal. There are still a number of enhancements we are working on so keep an eye out for new update packages and ensure HA4i is working in your best interest by keeping your data and objects ready for to be used when you need them.

Chris..