Concepts and Solutions
High Availability
The use of high-quality, partly redundant hardware components and a sophisticated concept for handling unexpected error situations through the system software – in conjunction with a comprehensive quality assurance concept – ensure a very high availability per se with the SE infrastructure. Fujitsu also offers the option of almost completely avoiding planned downtimes and significantly minimizing unplanned downtimes. Fujitsu provides various modules for integration in the customer's high-availability concept.
With the cluster concept of the SE infrastructure, Fujitsu enables the best possible safeguarding of continuous business processes – to the extent that planned downtimes can be completely avoided, and unplanned downtimes minimized considerably. A cluster consists of several interconnected SE servers.
If one of these servers is down, customer applications can run on another server. The administration of the cluster is in the same way as for a single server in a browser window of the SE Manager. The better overview of the entire SE infrastructure helps, especially in error situations, to avoid operating errors and to make customer applications available again quickly.
The SE infrastructure easily, efficiently and reliably achieves “always-on” availability of mainframe applications using Live Migration (LM).
In conjunction with LM, Fujitsu BS2000 SE series servers are the first and so far only mainframes in the world to support the relocation of guest systems and their customer applications to a second server during operation. Thus system downtime due to maintenance work on hardware or software is a thing of the past.
The high availability (HA) of the SE infrastructure offers “best-in-class” business continuity. In order to cushion even extremely rare unplanned failures, additional preventive measures are required. Examples of this are redundant configuration and data management, defined procedures for restarting, an emergency manual, regular failure tests, etc. In case of such an event everything has to happen quickly, so the processes should be automated as far as possible. Fujitsu ensures optimal readiness for failure scenarios through a tailor-made service offering for its customers.
The SE/HA Monitoring Service enables the implementation of a monitoring and managed automation system for BS2000 SE infrastructures for the targeted monitoring of selected hardware components, virtual machines and applications. A description of the SE/HA Monitoring Service is available here.
In BS2000, HIPLEX MSCF provides the infrastructure for the operation and administration of a system network, as well as basic functions for distributed applications. It extends server or system-local basic functions to clusters and thus creates the basic requirements for a high-availability network in BS2000. For further information see HIPLEX MSCF.
The ETERNUS functionality Storage Cluster Options connects two ETERNUS DX / AF storage systems to form a fail-safe storage cluster.
If one of the two storage systems fails, the applications continue to run transparently and without interruption on the remaining storage system.
SHC-OSD supports storage clusters in BS2000 by offering functions for information and monitoring, for manual failover/failback and for controlling the corresponding replication functions.
As part of the “ETERNUS Storage Cluster for BS2000” service, Fujitsu offers expert advice on creating and implementing a concept for using the ETERNUS Storage Cluster in BS2000. For further information see SHC-OSD or the Service Description: ETERNUS Storage Cluster for BS2000.
