You’ve probably heard the news that IBM Global Mailbox 6.0 is now available. I bet you have some questions and  I’m excited to provide some answers. Let’s get started with a look at what Global Mailbox delivers as a solution for high availability and/or disaster recovery and how it works.  

What is Global Mailbox 6.0

Global Mailbox 6.0 works with gateways, like IBM B2B Integrator or IBM File Gateway, to ensure that your gateway is always on and available to customers and trading partners 24x7x365, even when there is an outage, planned or unexpected.  

Key Capabilities in 6.0

Support for active/active deployments: IBM Global Mailbox 6.0 features a high availability architecture for active/active deployments across two data centers even if they are geographically dispersed. Both data centers are always up and running and working in conjunction with each other – sending, receiving, processing and replicating mailbox data. With true active/active support, in the event of a data center outage you can continue business as usual through the operating data center.

Extremely fault tolerant: You can now handle planned and unplanned maintenance with zero downtime. Global Mailbox provides redundancy through both hardware and software, so there is no single point of failure. You can survive a complete data center outage with minimal to no impact to your mailbox users.

Disaster recovery: Near real-time mailbox data replication across data centers, even when they’re on opposites sides of the globe from each other, ensures you can recover quickly from a disaster with minimal or no data loss.

Performance: Traditional gateway solutions operate over TCP which is reliable but uploading and downloading files slows down as geographic distances increase, adding to the latency. Global Mailbox allows you to place data centers closer to users to improve upload/download speeds. Global Mailbox also uses Aspera FASP transfer technology to replicate between data centers so regardless of the distance between your data centers, or the size and volume of data you’re dealing with, replication occurs in near real-time.

Modern user interface: The UI is easy to use and intuitive and we have aligned it with other IBM solutions, including Control Center and Transformation Extender. Three different perspectives – mailbox-centric (shown below), user-centric and event-centric – allow you to drill down quickly and manage information like message extractability, users’ mailbox permissions and routing rules.

Mailbox-centric view of mailbox hierarchy, messages, permissions, and event rules.  Navigate to a mailbox by tree, path or user's virtual root.

Installation and maintenance improvements: The latest release includes more guidance and improved documentation to help streamline installation. Improvements in maintenance, like purging activities with enhanced mailbox purge capabilities, allow you to spend less time on tedious tasks.

How it Works

As the illustration shows below, Global Mailbox works behind the scenes. When a trading partner accesses a mailbox to upload or download, they don’t know which data center they are accessing, and it doesn’t matter. The request is routed automatically to whichever data center can respond the quickest via the Global Load Balancer. It’s important to remember that the data replicated is mailbox data which consists of two pieces, the payload or file itself that is replicated using FASP, and the metadata (the data about the file, when it was received, size, etc.) that is replicated using Apache Cassandra.

Architecture Overview

I hope you’ve found this information helpful. Feel free to post questions or feedback in the Discussion Forum.

Learn more in Part 2, where I share some common use cases and how Global Mailbox can make your life easier.