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MIMIX [EOL]

June 2025

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

I have used MIMIX for some years now. The product is good and expensive. It requires daily checks to ensure the replication does not have issues. The software is upgraded fairly regularly, and patches for discovered bugs issued quickly.

The problem is the switchover to the target system. All current operations must be quiesced and there must be no left transaction to replicate before the switch can start. In our environment, this takes approximately 20 to 25 minutes. The switch to the target system takes about 10 minutes, and the subsystems restart on the target another 15 minutes. We test this scenario 3 times a year (we wrote our own CL programs for the switchover and switchback based on Lakeview's templates).

I suggest looking at this thread for more info.

All of the vendors provide replication from a primary machine to a backup machine. The last real hands on experience and testing I did took 45 minutes to synch up a MIMIX based machine after cutting over to the backup machine.

Sadly, unlike Linux or Unix you do not have real-time replication or load balanced system sharing that actually run parallel systems instead of primary & backup. This has been a huge shortcoming of OS/400 and IBM i forever. There may have been some improvement, but I've not seen them.

There are some good data replication products for IBM, I like Mimix which I used. The key to my comments are the fact that this has been an area of weakness since the AS/400 was first shipped. While Mimix and other products can provide data replication between machines there is no true HA solution that allows you to take a machine out of your network and continue processing as you can with other platforms and OS's.

For many IBM i customers data and object replication can be sufficient if you thoroughly review your program change management, security administration, network administration, etc. and make sure that:

1. You do not lose in flight data or that you know what you lose when you cut over.
2. Any programs that have been updated or changed on your primary machine are replicated to your back up machine.
3. Any other resources besides data or programs are replicated and synchronized.
4. User profiles and other security settings are synchronized, and
5. You have a network configuration that allows you to switch users to your backup machine.

This is not trivial and this really sets the vendors apart from each other. But keep in mind. Unlike modern could based scenarios you CANNOT balance your work load across multiple IBM i based systems and simply take one offline and keep on processing. You can do this on other platforms including Unix, Linux, and Windows.

IBM aquired Datamirror some years ago, then in 2012 IBM sold the ex-Datamiror product portfolio (iCluster) to RocketSoftware.

As far as logical replication HA solutions are concerned my impression is that the leader is Vision Solutions (who aquired Lakeview Solutions some years ago) with MIMIX both in terms of market share and in terms of solution and support quality, and in terms of being a visionary for logical replication HA solutions.

Our HA consultants have had experience both with iCluster and MIMIX products and their input thus far suggests that while iCluster is a fairly good HA choice, MIMIX Availability product line is superior when it comes to ease of use, functionality, reliability, customer support and consultant network. We have quite a few customers using MIMIX running heavy transaction workloads, and switchover time is no more than a couple of minutes. We also have customers with iCluster, but they are now thinking of returning to MIMIX.

There are of course other, hardware-based (and OS/400-based) HA solutions for iSeries (e.g. PowerHA SystemMirror) that are definitely worth considering, since over the years these hardware-based solutions have become more and more enhanced. Hardware-based HA solutions can be configured and managed somewhat simpler than logical HA replication solutions, but these may lack useful features logical replications do have (e.g. selective data replication).

Your best HA choice basically depends on multiple factors such as your current operations environment (amount of data to be replicated / change rate, distance and bandwidth between backup and production site), your existing hardware infrastructure (e.g. do you already have some kind of external storage?), existing skills of your staff and your Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective.