As businesses adopt a cloud-first strategy, reducing on-premises infrastructure and moving IT and business applications to the cloud, the limitations and costs of traditional data protection and disaster recovery become more apparent. Druva Phoenix™ provides a cloud-native approach that helps businesses accelerate their journey to the cloud by reducing infrastructure management and improving business resilience. Delivered as-a-service, Druva Phoenix boasts…
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Precisely Assure MIMIX
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Assure MIMIX from Precisely (formerly Syncsort) offers IBM i high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for companies worldwide, from small businesses to global enterprises, who can use Assure MIMIX to prevent data loss and eliminate planned and unplanned downtime. Assure MIMIX provides scalable real-time replication with options for automating administration, monitoring and alerting, customizable switch automation, and a graphical…
Durva Phoenix is well suited for the VMware platform and has great restore functionality during disaster recovery. We use a different VM platform so our disaster recovery has a longer timeline if there is a critical failure as we need to get a base OS loaded before we can restore the VM data to it. This is the tradeoff between an expensive VM platform and a near free VM platform. Druva Phoenix is well suited to file version recovery if a previous data state is required by your employees or customers. Very quick to restore.
MIMIX is clearly the best IBMi solution for most high availability and disaster recovery situations. It provides rock-solid replication and agile ability to switch quickly. In its earlier days, some organizations used it as a primary daily system backup method. With the advent of Ransomware, this is no longer advisable. The strength of MIMIX real-time replication becomes a weakness if IBMi data becomes infected. As in any real-time replication product, at that point, two systems are infected.
The best part about Druva is that you deploy, which is fairly easy especially with your technical rep being available for the whole process, and then you let the system do your work. If a backup fails I get a report, there is no need to check it every day or even weekly.
The file server backup is great. Searching is easy and the capability to pull back a full folder or individual file makes life a lot easier to support my end users.
The UI is good, but a bit inconsistent. Some types of backups are shown differently to others. It never gets in the way, but a bit more consistency would be good.
The system is usage based, which is understandable, but a shock after using inSync, their other backup product, which is not. Careful planning and thought is needed if you are on a tight budget
Certain backup solutions can be cumbersome on how they actually work. Where that's properly deploying hardware or software that will house the backups. Druva is different where the software and infrastructure is completely managed. All we needed to do is deploy agents and proxies and point the backups to Druva Phoenix
MIMIX is software built for availability. By its nature it is must be available. As long as the underlying system and communication network are available MIMIX is working. And if there are failures in either of those, MIMIX is designed to allow for a quick and resilient recovery once underly systems or communications are restored
I have never seen MIMIX itself be a performance bottleneck. However it is important to consider the network in overall performance of any remotely replicated systems. MIMIX can only replicate as fast as the network allows. But a strong capability of MIMIX is its ability to "buffer" its replication, so it can be sent without error as the network allows
It's been pretty easy to get a hold of the Support team and they work well to resolve our issues. I wish I could email support directly (which we used to be able to do) versus having to login to the console and report an issue from there, that's a feature I'd like to see brought back but otherwise, their Support team is pleasant to work with.
Support is available and efficient. Response time is good and likelyhood of a quick resolutiion is high. However the mature solid product and proactive management tools, fortunately make support requirements relatively rare. The support for version upgrades is also strong, but again the basic upgrade process is usually straightforward and well documented.
Druva stacks up well against its competitors. I do not remember it being at a disadvantage in any category. Phoenix couldn't provide message-level restore on an on-premise Exchange server but after we moved to the cloud that requirement went away.
We used MIMIX for its role for iSeries high availability. We used Double Take by Vision Solutions for our production Windows environment. MIMIX is designed for iSeries, and Double Take was designed for Windows. We had VMware virtual environment, running multiple VMs for production ERP Lawson M3, now Infor. Both MIMIX and Double Take played the role well for what needed to be done. Without either MIMIX or DoubleTake, the business would have been impacted.
MIMIX works to its intended functionality. It provides real time data replication across multiple partitions and systems as defined. I have never witnessed any problems with MIMIX in scaling to larger systems or adding new data groups. In conjunction with the inherent scalability of IBMi scalability and configuration flexibillity are rather quick and easy.
This is a necessary service to keep your information safe. I would not say that there is a tangible ROI unless you reach a point where your server gets attacked and wiped-out. Then, you can recover your information in an easy manner, which could represent a potential several-thousand-dollar savings.
