Mainframe style data sharing comes to AIX

IBM announce their latest software technology, DB2 pureScale

Since its introduction to the market in the mid-90s, DB2 for z/OS data sharing became the gold standard for enterprise data-serving scalability and availability. Customers using DB2 on midrange platforms have long been calling for similar capabilities. This has now arrived in the form of DB2 pureScale.

Based on the industry leading System z data sharing architecture, DB2 pureScale integrates IBM technologies to keep critical systems available 24/7. The technology is currently built on IBM Power Systems with other platforms available in the future. DB2 pureScale allows organisations to have multiple database servers in a system that all share a common set of disks providing both scalability, availability and application transparency.

"This is the single most significant technology release that IBM has introduced to the midrange market in years. By utilizing many years of mainframe data sharing experience, DB2 pureScale will revolutionise the way organisations are able to manage their workload, helping them to achieve industry-leading levels of scalability and availability for their mission critical applications." said Julian Stuhler, Triton Director & Past President of IDUG (International DB2 Users Group) "Triton have been working with data sharing on the mainframe since it appeared in the mid-90’s. It is hugely exciting to know that we will be able to put these skills into practice for our midrange customers now too."

Continuous Availability
DB2 pureScale keeps critical systems available all the time, giving uninterrupted access to data throughout both planned and unplanned outages. Fast recovery and data availability is assured, even with large clusters, by utilising the centralised locking capability of PowerHA pureScale.

In situations where one or more servers fail, whether due to hardware or software problems; the workload balancer automatically recognises which servers are available and sends transactions across to these servers without application interruption. Whilst this is happening, DB2 pureScale is doing a fast crash recovery on the failing node. By using automatic workload balancing to ensure that no node in the system is over loaded, DB2 will route transactions or connections to the least heavily used server.

Zero Downtime for Planned Outages
DB2 pureScale allows routine hardware maintenance, operating system changes or other configuration changes to be carried out by simply removing the relevant server from the cluster. The workload balancer redistributes transactions to the other servers in the cluster. This is done with complete transparency to the application and no interruption to the environment meaning that planned outages can be carried out whenever necessary rather than waiting for that late-night on Sunday window. This is vital for global organisations with users accessing their systems 24/7.

Capacity on Demand
Being able to quickly respond to rises in workload has become a competitive advantage. IT teams need the ability to respond quickly to change requests and provide extra capacity at peak times.

DB2 pureScale is designed to allow organisations to grow and shrink their server cluster on demand. This can be done without application changes and with no interruption to the business. Organisations that experience large peaks and troughs in their workload can add more capacity during that period and remove it when workloads reduce.

Cost Savings
Instead of over-provisioning environments to handle peak times, organisations can license the machines they want for the time they need. Customers can choose to pay for the additional cores only on the days that they use them. This means that a server can be added for a few days during those peak times and released when it is no longer needed, without additional cost.

Application Transparency
DB2 pureScale allows modification, maintenance and tuning; transparently to the application. Additional servers can be added without the need for application developers to re-design their applications.

Triton Consulting are IBM Premier Business Partners and have expert knowledge of DB2 both in mainframe and midrange environments. Having expertise in both areas means that our consultants can bring their years of mainframe data sharing experience together with their knowledge of DB2 for midrange and so are ideally placed to provide support on DB2 pureScale implementations.

For more information on DB2 pureScale talk to the DB2 experts – Triton Consulting.

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