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12

BACKUPS without impact on production !

TEST ENVIRONMENTS REFRESHED ON DEMAND !
RECOVERY COPIES ON THE FLY !

FLASH for i

Description

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

             With ZERO disruption of your production, you can:

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

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

FLASH for i

More

More information ? Click here !

FLASH for i

Objectives

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

  • Run a SAVE21 every day, without any impact on the production
  • Run your usual daily backup, with or without BRMS
  • Refresh in some minutes partitions dedicated to many activities : Testing, Acceptance, Pre-prod, Anonymisation, …
  • Create a Test partition before any kind of upgrade (system, application, …)
  • Extract data from the Clone partition to feed your Data Analytic or DWH
  • Copy your production disks before and/or after a critical Batch
  • Generate 2, 12 or 24 copies of your disks for RECOVERY or Roll-back purposes

Example : Users and programs remain active on the Production partition while 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 (DSPLOG, Job logs, BRMS files, …)

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 EMC Vmax, Unity or PureStorage (other models and manufacturers to come).

Get automatically a clone of the production partition

Backup an IBM i partition with no impact on the production

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

Flash for i Picture

Your needs

  • You have (or plan to acquire) a 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 a data corruption or a loss of data …
  • You want to reduce the daily backup window to zero or at the maximum to 2 minutes.
  • 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 to the Production partition status in real time and 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 !!!

Download the brochure

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, several 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)
  • …

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).

IBM i

IBM i

IBM i5-OS | AS/400

IBM i5-OS | AS/400

Built On Power

Built On Power

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