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Informix replication between PA-RISC and Itanium servers

 
Gregory Locke
Frequent Advisor

Informix replication between PA-RISC and Itanium servers

Hi Gang:

I can't seem to get an answer on this. We have three HP systems: Production, Disaster Recovery and Development. We are running 6 processor licenses of Informix. I am not an Informix person. It is my understanding that with each transaction to our production server, the transaction is also duplicated on our DR server (in another state) with a process called HDR (replication) for emergency purposes. Unfortunately, our DR system would be inadequate in a disaster.

We were planning to replace our production HP server with an HP Itanium server, and use the outgoing 9000 as our DR system off site. We want to know if we can still HDR between an Itanium server and a PA-RISC server? Anyone know, suggestions, HELP? Thanking you all in advance.
2 REPLIES 2
Steve Lewis
Honored Contributor

Re: Informix replication between PA-RISC and Itanium servers

Well, I have done quite a bit of HDR testing in the past, even across different versions. But in this case I would urge you that
the versions really must be identical to the last
e.g. 9.40.FC7 to 9.40.FC7 and nothing else.

The communication is via network and the data format in the storage is the same, so I think you should set it up in a test environment and see what happens. I think you should be fine.

Don't set auto-failover, but do break the connection after a while and test switching it back and forth - that will send data back and forth from PA_RISC to Itanium and vice versa.

We did an unsupported *vgimport* of PA_RISC instance/database into an Itanium one, i.e.
- no export/import
- no backup/restore
- the same self bytes on the disks
and it worked fine in testing, but I wouldn't trust it to production out of principle.

We got more serious problems with sysmaster when the sub-versions were different.

It may not be officially supported, you need to check with IBM, but I say test it thoroughly and see how you go.
If you want cast-iron warranty then go for 2 Itanium servers. Judging by our consolidation efforts, you may need less cores than you think.




Gregory Locke
Frequent Advisor

Re: Informix replication between PA-RISC and Itanium servers

Both Informix and HP claimed that this would work. We are presently in a testing phase of Itanium to PA-RISC HDR replication. So far, so good.