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…
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Qlik Replicate
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Qlik Replicate enables organizations to accelerate data real-time replication, ingestion and streaming via change data capture, across a wide range of heterogeneous databases, data warehouses and data lake platforms.
We tried MIMIX, SQL SSIS and Veeam but our team found Qlik Replicate had an advantage over all these three in terms of speed, UI, and ease of maintenance.
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.
Qlik Replicate works very well with relational data platforms, both on premise and in the cloud, for example Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and others, it also works very well with DB2. If the data source is MongoDB, it is more complicated and currently there is no possibility of sending data to MongoDB.
Replicate is extremely stable and does not generate a lot of alerts/failures/issues that take up time to troubleshoot.
It is very easy to add new source tables to a Replicate task so that we're always in sync with new data available from the CRM.
It's nice that Qlik Replicate also allows you to create a job to stop and then restart your tasks during maintenance windows that occur on both the source and target systems.
The base Replicate web GUI is lacking. If you have dozens or more tasks, it's hard to get a sense of how they're performing. Enterprise Manager solves all of these problems but is a separate install.
The support portal is extremely difficult to navigate. It's hard to track down exactly what you're looking for.
It would be helpful to have better documentation and example queries for the tables in the Enterprise Manager analytics database.
Destination databases that don't support common DDL commands behave unpredictably. And the replication of schema changes isn't consistent.
The availability of the replicated data in disparate environments has is now crucial. Replacing a product like Qlik Replicate would require significant time, investments, and work. In addition, Qlik Replicate is reasonably reliable with few failures.
We now have greater business flexibility and scalability, and our big data integration projects have a quick rate of growth, which has been profitable for us. Independent of the sources involved, maintaining data consistency between sources is easy. One of my favorite features is the way it lets owners of the source system start and stop processes from updating their system windows.
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.
The issue I've had is that Qlik does an awful job of keeping their customers informed when new versions of the software are available. We found that we were using a version that was no longer supported and could never get help. When it came time to get us upgraded so that we were on a current version, no one knew how to help get us to where we needed to be. We had to purchased professional services time and even then I was basically on my own to get everything built out and set up. Qlik needs to be more proactive with communicating about new releases and how to get your version upgraded in the most secure, safe way possible.
Follow the directions from the Qlik documentation. They are pretty straight forward and easy enough to follow. If you follow these, then you are not likely to have issues on implementation.
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.
Great tool for data replication solution for Oracle/SQLServers/etc. Real easy to get it set up and start realizing business value. Getting the PoC accomplished in a short window. Product costing and easy to start small and scale as needed. It helped cover most of our ask compared to other solutions.
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.
Prior to using Qlik Replicate, we used an ETL solution to copy data from the Oracle ERP system to the Microsoft SQL Server BI system at a 15-minute interval. It was very tedious to maintain. Qlik Replicate is much easier to use and we replicate data near real-time now.
