Today we set up a couple of LPAR’s on the IBM VLP systems with RAP/400 and a data generation program. The program simply adds over 5000 records into a set of files over 5 libraries, it also adds data to Data areas and creates IFS directories and files. The environment is set up to automatically journal the Files in the file libraries and IFS directories and objects as they get created.
Installing RAP/400 took about 3 minutes and to configure the 6 journals took less than 2 minutes. So overall very easy to install and set up. In fact it only took us 5 hours to build the entire environment from scratch using the system commands so I would expect the general users to be able to do the same in less than 1/2 day because the data and objects will already exists as well as the journal environment.
The data generation program takes about 40 seconds to run on the source system for each library and we run it against the 4 libraries we have set up to contain the objects and files. The configuration has 6 journals which are all remote journalled to the target system. 2 journals carry the *IFS, *DTAARA, *DTAQ object and the other 4 have all of the DB files journalled to them. The program also deletes and creates a file in a specific library and adds entries to it after it has been created.
We run a program which changes the journal on the source system which in turn triggers the apply of the data on the target system. As soon as we call the program to change the journal we switched to the target system to view the system activity on the target, we were very surprised initially to see no activity at all. Thinking the apply had not occurred we check all of the objects and found that the apply process had in fact run, so fast we never saw the activity. A couple more attempts and we did see the process run for a few seconds, we feel this is pretty amazing considering we are processing 6 journal receiver requests through the process.
The next step will be to increase the number of file adds and see what the impact is, the CPU utilization was minimal as well.
I have been demonstrating HA products to customers for a number of years and was always able to capture activity through the apply process. This is going to be more difficult to show.
I hope to have the next version available for shipment at the end of May 2007 which is a major improvement on the previous release.
If you would like to trial the new product and have a fairly heavy processing box let us know, we would like to see the product working in seriously hard working environments.
Chris….