OptiConnect connectivity advantages

 

OptiConnect provides several advantages through shared database clustering, such as horizontal growth and high availability.

Planning and managing a computing system involves many decisions, such as where to place files, where to attach communications lines, and where to locate the most critical applications. Each system involved limits the decisions. Here are some of the limits:

• Processing capacity limits

• Distribution of users and applications across systems

• Maximum amount of storage, or maximum number of communications lines that are attached to the systems

OptiConnect provides solutions to many of these problems by enabling capacity growth through shared database clustering. The OptiConnect cluster not only achieves horizontal growth and high availability, but also helps data warehousing and database parallelism architectures.

 

Horizontal growth

By separating database operations from application workload, multiple systems can operate as a cluster to grow computing power beyond what a single system can provide. Not all applications are favorable to this type of workload distribution. The horizontal growth scalability depends on the database input/output (I/O) intensity. The best implementation is to separate the interactive application from the corresponding data while maintaining the batch application on the same system as the batch data. Techniques are available to transparently manage the batch job submission to the database system.

 

High availability

OptiConnect can be used to provide high availability solutions. Single-system high availability has an upper limit at the point of failure of that system. However, multiple systems connected together can provide continuous availability. OptiConnect includes a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows application programs to access the high-speed bus transport. These APIs are intended for use by IBM^® Business Partners in the development of high availability solutions. Applications that provide database mirroring using the OptiConnect connections are available from IBM Business Partners.

All OptiConnect technologies allow System i™ applications to perform intersystem database accesses across a high-performance interface. The ability to efficiently read and update data on connected systems provides the following benefits:

• Multiple clients can easily and efficiently access databases on a server by splitting the processor load for an application across the clients and server.

  The clients run the nondatabase portion of an application, and the server runs the database activity. Multiple systems provide greater total processing capacity for database access than a single system can achieve. OptiConnect allows this increased capacity by decreasing processor load and using high-speed connections.

• Customer environments with multiple databases (or databases that can be partitioned into multiple databases) can extend the client/server database model to have multiple systems. Applications can access all the databases across OptiConnect connections regardless of the database location.

  Ideally, applications and users are assigned to a system that contains the data that they use most heavily. Less heavily used data can reside on any of the other systems. This allows you to spread applications to achieve the best balance and throughput.

• Duplication of databases can be eliminated to decrease response time.

  For example, if you currently maintain copies of data on several systems, you can connect the systems to achieve consistent response time. All applications can access and update one single database.

• OptiConnect functions can be used to duplicate copies of a database and update duplicated data more efficiently.

 

Parent topic:

Concepts

Related reference
OptiConnect APIs