IBM Storage Protect Plus vs. Precisely Assure MIMIX

Good for daily operational backups and their replications and areas like VM backup, when it comes to resting the backups in a cloud environment especially features like BYOL is an edge to IBM over its near competitors. On the other hand, a lot of scopes to improve to have native/application-aware backups for modern applications like AI and microservices.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• recovery
• replication
• retention

Incentivized

• Redundancy - needs to be available at a moment's notice.
• Protection - the business would be greatly impacted, therefore protection of production systems is key to the business succeeding.
• Usability - needs to be user-friendly, easy to navigate and operate, as it will be required at any given time.

Incentivized

• Incorporation of more touchless agents for physical servers.
• Direct offload to tape - instead of requiring Spectrum Protect.

Incentivized

• Possible false sense of security for ransomware attacks.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus doesn't allow taking backup of the Meditech HIMS application, due to the unique nature of the database and its functionality. As it's a special case, the vendor supports only a few fully integrated backup solutions which resulted in using Bridgehead as a trustable backup option specific to the application.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Cloud backup can be expensive and slow

Incentivized

• MIMIX had a positive impact, as the organization has had to rely upon the unplanned switch.
• MIMIX definite must if organization is running i Series, and business needs are 24/7.
• Without MIMIX in place, the downtime impact to the business would have been great.

Incentivized