Executive summary

Keeping up with today’s increasingly global and competitive marketplace requires a data processing architecture that provides the flexibility to grow with future strategic requirements and ensures business continuity throughout component outages, maintenance activities, and catastrophic events.

For some enterprises, a single hour of downtime can translate to millions of dollars of lost revenue, not to mention the damage to the company’s reputation and the potential loss of customers. Global enterprises operate across time zones and offer business services around the clock. Reserved offline windows for system maintenance and upgrades no longer exist. Distributed enterprises need the ability to provide proximity of service in each geographic location, coupled with the ability to circumvent network failures or transmission times.

This paper outlines an architecture that addresses these availability requirements.

In December 2009, IBM introduced the DB2 pureScale Feature for Enterprise Server Edition. The DB2 pureScale Feature builds on proven design features from the IBM DB2 for z/OS database software. The DB2 pureScale Feature is intended to meet the needs of many customers by providing:

• -  Virtually unlimited capacity: the ability to scale out your system by adding additional machines to your cluster with ease.

• -  Application transparency: the ability to leverage your existing applications without changes.

• -  Single site continuous availability: by providing an “all active” architecture with inherent redundancy.

• -  Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): reducing the total cost of ownership by allowing for a simplified deployment and management of advanced technology.

  Since its first release in 2004, the Q Replication technology has provided low-latency, high-volume replication for DB2. Q Replication complements the capabilities of pureScale by providing:

• Protection from disk and site failure by replicating the database to a remote site.

• Continuous availability during upgrades and full site maintenance by allowing the transfer of applications to another site until maintenance is completed, and the re- synchronization of these sites afterward

• Workload off-loading and live reporting by offloading reporting applications to another database, thereby eliminating any possible contention with business critical workloads, and allowing analytics and reporting on live data.
• Protection from data corruptions by maintaining a secondary copy of the database where changes are delayed in relation to the primary, allowing for a quick recovery from user or application errors.