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We deal with a lot of HA/DR customers who are running 2 or more systems to provide either High Availability or Disaster Recovery on their systems, this means they have two copies of the data which the could use in a read only state on one of the systems (target). Many times the only real purpose you can get out of the target system is report generation or back up which leaves a lot of processing power untapped on the target system. There are also some customers who load balance by splitting production over the two systems and having each production environment replicated to the other, they are doing a better job of resource utilization but have a more complex environment to manage.
With the EasyCom set up we are going to trial the use of both servers from a single Linux HTTP server (in fact we will run 3 systems serving a single Linux HTTP server) to see what the impact will be. We think this will have a number of benefits, firstly the Linux system will be the only system which would have to be linked to the internet (if this is required) as the IBM i servers would be sitting on the internal network. Secondly all of the configuration is going to be on the Linux system, the IBM i servers will not need any configuration other than the EasyCom server (IP and port number) so any changes to the HTTP configuration can be done on a single system. I am sure there will be many more but for us these stand out.
We cannot see any problems with this setup? The setup of the IBM i will be very simple, setting up the Linux server will be a simple IP configuration for the connections and because its already running a single instance the hard bit (if you can call it hard) has already been done.
We still think the IBM i is a great box so we are not looking at moving away from it, but being able to remove some of the workload (and that relates to cost especially on the IBM i) to a lower cost solution should be a benefit to everyone. As we get closer to developing the solution we will publish what problems we encountered if any.
Chris…