Precisely Assure MIMIX vs. TBMR

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

During the Sandy storm, I was told to get over 200 servers ready in case we declare a disaster. I was able to spin over 190 servers in five days. I recovered servers using TBMR recovery. I restored each server using TBMR. After the server was restored at Sungard, I powered on the server without NIC to prevent a production issue with duplicate a name or IP. I validated each server after restore to make sure OS is working correctly and all data had been restored. I did not restore images due to the size of storage. Overall, it worked out and we were ready before Sandy struck. We did not go into disaster mode, but my management was impressed that this product worked as described.

• 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

• It works 99.9% all the time if you setup correctly. In some instance there was issue was disk was not able to read partition. I called support and upload the log file. They told me during recovery point to new modify file instead of reading from backup configuration. It work and able to recover quickly
• The support is really great. They are always ready to help in any situation.
• During Sandy storm, we mentioned our challenges. They told us there will two support engineer will be stand by for support any time. Just let them know when you need support.
• Support is staff is very knowledgeable. They willing to go extra mile all the time

• Possible false sense of security for ransomware attacks.

Incentivized

• There have been so bugs in the software. They provided me the next day with a temporary fix. In the next release, they will fix the bug permanenly.
• As far as we use it, I do not see too much on functionality.
• Setup is unique in every organization. It has been working well so far.

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

Support is great. They go beyond the normal service. I called a few times in the middle of the night for support. I was not able to recover some machines. They called back with half an hour and worked through it with me. They wanted to make sure I was able to recover the server. They are always willing to help.

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

When I started TSM/Spectrum Protect over 13 years ago, disaster recovery was not funded to much. Once all regulatory requirements and auditing became more visible, management decided to start disaster recovery. I looked into one other BMR product. It required lots of manual processes to build WinPE iso images. I needed to build ISO images for each version of the TSM Client. At that time, we had over 350 Windows and Linux servers. There were over 10 different TSM Clients running. It was difficult to maintain all the different ISOs. I am only one admin doing the backup job and other duties. It was not possible to keep. I started to shop around for a different BMR solution for TSM. I came across Cristie. We did POC testing for 1 month. We covered HP physical servers to IBM hardware and vice versa. It worked without any issue. We also tried to recover HP physical servers from DL360 to DL380 and others. It works every time. At that time my management got assurance that this is a good product for investment. We started with 300 licenses. Now we have over 200 Physical and 600 virtual license

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

• 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

• As of today, we are recovering servers without any issue. There is no 100% success. Some servers backup corrupted data and are restored the same way. It is called Garbage in Garbage out. So far management wants to continue the use of this product.
• My management wants to use TBMR or any other backup.
• Every year we are buying more licenses.