As a development company we are always updating objects on our development systems and need to transfer them to our test systems. This can be a very intensive process when the objects have to be sent to each of our test systems using save files and FTP. Each object has to be saved to a save file, the save file sent to each system before signing onto each system and restoring the objects into the required library.
We already have a number of replication products for availability but the problem is each product is a single node replication process, that is each source and target system are matched so you can only send the objects in a single direction between a pair of systems. We needed something that would allow us to distribute each object to a number of systems from the development system that would carry out the underlying save and restore processes automatically.
Our availability replication processes already carry out the underlying replication, all we needed to do was build the interfaces over those processes to allow the processes to go to any number of target systems. This resulted in our RE4i product which provides a number of commands that run on the source system and a TCP/IP server job that runs on the target(s) to carry out the automatic restore of the objects. The product has benefited from the experience we have gained from our availability products in terms of being able to manage the security aspects of distributing objects between systems and the save/restore restrictions imposed by the OS.
The product has commands which allow IFS, Configuration objects, Libraries and single objects to be replicated to a target system. We have also added a command which will set the ownership of the target object to the same owner as the source (when the object is copied to the target the ownership becomes that of the profile used on the source) so you can maintain the object authorities on the target.
Another feature we added is the ability to distribute commands to target systems, these will be run on the target and confirmation of their success returned to the source. This follows the same rules as the object distribution in terms of the profile used on the target. We have used the object distribution and command capabilities to send PTF files to the target system and run the required commands to LODPTF and APYPTF without the need to sign onto the target system(s), obviously we would not recommend this kind of use without understanding the requirements the PTF process and the individual requirements of the PTF’s to be processed.
We have set the price of the product at $500US per install, this should make it a very affordable solution for many of the companies out there that need the ability to distribute objects without incurring the significant cost of other similar solutions.
If you are interested in a free trail of the product let us know and we will be happy to contact you to set up the installation and demo.
Chris…