Precisely Assure MIMIX vs. Zerto on IBM Cloud

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

Zerto on IBM Cloud is great to get your datacenter redundant and highly available. It overcomes geographic contingencies and makes your production environment reliably flexible. If you do not like the added cost of redundancy or cost of cloud services, this inconvenient fee may not fit you well. But you'd be better off in the long run to have Zerto protecting your bottom line despite the cost.

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

• It is easy to get started.
• It is also very simple to set up the backup.
• Disaster recovery is no longer a dreadful or painful process.

Incentivized

• Possible false sense of security for ransomware attacks.

Incentivized

• Enable the ability to use IBM Cloud Object Storage as a target for Zerto's long-term retention feature.
• Easier access to the underlying VMware infrastructure would be nice. Right now we have to connect to IBM's VPN and use other tools to do some infrastructure management tasks.
• More insight into the IBM-side VMware environment that we replicate to (i.e. ability to see available IPs, etc). Most of that is managed by IBM.

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

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

Before we were using native backup solutions. We elected to bring in Zerto on IBM Cloud so that our team could have the ability to take small increments of data over time so that the final cutover would be quick and efficient.

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

• 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

• Positive is the option of bringing your own license.
• Negative - the complex environments are not supported.
• This cannot be used as a backup replacement rather DR tool.

Incentivized