BACKUPS without impact on production !

TEST ENVIRONMENTS REFRESHED ON DEMAND !
MANY DAILY RECOVERY COPIES FOR ROLLBACK !

FLASH for i

Description

Flash for i product manages, automates, controls and reports all the FlashCopy/SnapShot operations on your External Storage, from your IBM i LPARs.

With ZERO disruption of your production, you can:

– perform ‘INSTANT COPIES’ of your IBM i production partition

– and execute MANY operations on the ‘Clone’ of your PROD, IN PARALLEL of the PROD

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FLASH for i

More information ? Click here for Version 5 details !

And why not about Version 4, here

FLASH for i

Objectives

The clone partition of your PROD can be used for several types of operation such as:

Run your usual daily backup, with or without BRMS
Run a SAVE21 every day, without any impact on the production
Refresh in some minutes partitions dedicated to many activities : Testing, Acceptance, Pre-prod, Anonymisation, …
Create a Test partition before an upgrade (system, application, …)
Extract data from the Clone partition to feed your DataWarehouse or execute your Analytic queries on the Clone LPAR
Copy for security your production disks before and/or after a critical Batches
Generate daily 2, 12 or more copies of your disks for RECOVERY or Roll-back purposes (resilience objective = DORA compliance)

Note: with ‘Flash for i’ users and programs remain active on the Production partition while, for example, a full system backup (SAVE21) is being carried out on the ‘Clone’.

FLASH for i

How it works

All operations are managed from the Production partition, using IBM i commands
A single ‘FLCLONE’ command launches the complete chaining
Operations on HMC, VIOS, External Storage are automated
Connection between the production partition and other elements are secured
The history of the operations carried out on the Clone partition is sent on the Production (Job logs, Dsplogs, Syslogs, BRMS files, …)
An optional module allow you to manage centrally the setup and operations of many/plenty LPARs

Prerequisites:

IBM i V7R1 and above
No iASP is needed, but iASP are fully supported.
HMC or Novalink console (other to come)
External IBM storage: Storwize, SVC, FlashSystem, DS8000
External Non IBM Storage: EMC (Vmax, PowerMax,Unity) , PureStorage (other models and manufacturers to come).

Get instantly and automatically a clone of the production partition

Backup an IBM i partition with no impact on the production

Based on Flashcopy / SnapShot features of External Storage (IBM, EMC, …).

Your needs

You have (or plan to acquire) a new Power Server with one or more IBM i partitions, and external disks storage array.
Your Database and Applications must be available 24/7
You are having trouble finding enough time for a SAVE21
You lose plenty of hours to create environments as test/acceptance/preprod … and what about anonymisation
Your UAT database is refreshed only once a quarter and data is more and more spoiled
You worry before a system or application upgrade
Data extraction to your Data Analytic solution is heavy
You fear to loss data because of errors or clumsiness
You are scared by the time needed to recover from a data corruption or a ransomware
You want to reduce the daily backup window down to zero close to it
You would never dream to create a temporary ‘Read only’ partition or ‘Query/SQL’ partition

Benefits

Reduce drastically your Backup windows
Perform a SAVE21 every day.
Reduce drastically your Data extraction windows
Improve the quality of your Test/Acceptance by refreshing frequently and automatically your UAT environments
Secure your BATCH, copying instantly your disks before and/or after them
Put your data in a vault (on your External Storage) to get it back in case of a corruption or any ‘data incident’ …
Instantaneous and automatic generation of the Clone partition fully driven from an IBM i command.

The solutions brought by Flash for i

Create a “Clone” partition of your production using the FlaschCopy/SnapShot feature of your External Storage.
Allows you to perform any type of operation on the Clone partition, with NO impact on Production partition.
Fully automated process, using IBM i commands from your Production partition.
Monitor the status of the operations
Provide all status from Clone partition to the Production partition in real time and get the full history of the operations

Note: in the big majority of the use cases, the CLONED DISKS just needs between 5 to 15 % of the original disk space… It’s really magic !!!

FLASH for i

Principles

The Flash For i product manages the various hardware and software components involved with the IBM i partition cloning with the aim of making for example backups with a minimal impact on production.

All operations are managed from the Production partition (also called the “source partition”).

The source partition is cloned in 4 steps:

If necessary, stop the previous clone partition (and the previous FlashCopy).
- Flash For i, from the source partition, sends to the HMC an instruction to immediately stop the clone partition.
Quiesce the source partition.
- Using the CHGASPACT command, the source partition copy on disks all the active data contained in the memory.
Start the FlashCopy consistency group.
- The source partition sends an instruction to the external Storage unit.
- At that point, the volumes presented to the target partition are an exact copy of the source partition volumes.
- The source and target volumes now can operate completely independently.
Start the clone partition.
- The source partition sends the HMC instructions to start the clone partition
- and ask the clone partition to execute all the type of operation you have previously setup in Flash for i.

FLASH for i

When the clone partition starts after the cloning, very little number of system configuration parameters are adjusted:

Change of system name
Network/IP re-configuration
Change Start-up program
Hold of all the scheduled jobs (WRKJOBSCDE, JS1) and Spoolers

The clone partition then restarts in order to apply the new settings.

The Flash for i product also maps/unmaps volumes in the VIOS before stopping or after starting FlashCopy in order to avoid numerous error messages in the VIOS(es) (unless NPIV-type configuration has been performed).

BACKUPS without impact on production !

FLASH for i

Description

Download the 1 page Flyer

FLASH for i

More

FLASH for i

Objectives

FLASH for i

How it works

Your needs

Benefits

The solutions brought by Flash for i

FLASH for i

Principles

FLASH for i

IBM i

IBM i5-OS | AS/400

Built On Power

Products / Produits