The Infrascale Platform is the flagship cloud storage, data protection, and disaster recovery platform from the California based company, Infrascale.
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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…
The Infrascale Platform solution we have in place is certainly not cheap - I believe we are paying about $2800/month for it, though it is quite robust. We have 18TB of on-site storage available, with the same available in a secondary - remote - device for replication. They do have a wide range of products available to any size business though, so I'm sure they have cheaper offerings as well. The on-site appliance is fantastic - in that in houses your backups, but can also be utilized as an emergency piece of hardware to spin up a backup and run it in the event of your primary hardware failing. You can also traverse full backups to grab single, contained, files if you so choose. We love that feature as we must perform file recovery monthly for audit purposes.
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.
It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.
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
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.
Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).
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.
Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite
As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good.