[ogb-discuss] HA-Clusters Community Project (HA-Informix)

[Neil Garthwaite]

Dear OpenSolaris Governing Board members:

Please see our HA-Clusters community proposal for a Informix Dynamic 
Server cluster agent (HA-Informix) for Open High Availability Cluster 
(OHAC) as per 2.2 of  
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/policies/project-instantiation.txt

Your support in the instantiation of this project is greatly appreciated.

Regards
Neil

1) Purpose

   The purpose of this project is to provide a failover agent for IBM 
Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) as part of the open-source code base for 
Solaris Cluster, namely Open High Availability Cluster (OHAC). The aim 
of this project is to focus on IDS 11, code-named "Cheetah".

2) Sponsors

   The Community Group sponsoring this project is the HA-Clusters 
community and voted with 3 +1 votes and 0 -1 vote.

3) Initial Project Team

   - Thorsten Frueauf
   - Neil Garthwaite (Contact)
   - Detlef Ulherr

4) Project Description

   IDS 11 currently provides several availability features namely:

   - High Availability Data Replication (HADR)
   - Enterprise Replication (ER)
   - Shared Disk Secondary server (SDS)
   - Remote Standalone Secondary (RSS)

   Refer to
   
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/Availability_whitepaper.pdf 

   for more details on the above features.

    Developing an agent for IDS 11 for OHAC simply provides further 
choice for availability and could be used together with the availability 
features of IDS 11 or as a solution by itself.

5) Related Projects

    Currently IBM provides a Sun Cluster failover agent for IDS that was 
created for SC 3.1 update 2 for Solaris SPARC.

    IBM provides this agent as free to download but does not offer any 
formal support for the agent. Specifically the customer is encouraged to 
modify the agent thereby owning the code. In particular the following 
text is available when downloading the agent.

    "IBM Informix HA Agent is sample code that helps customers in 
setting up IDS (Informix Dynamic Server) in a Sun Cluster environment. 
The package explains how this sample code works and how it can be used 
to support IDS in a cluster environment. This package is basic and we 
expect any customer to modify it based on their requirements."

6) Additional Information

   The failover agent for IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) that this 
project proposes will be new code and will not inherit any code from 
IBM's current agent for IDS. It is our understanding from IBM that they 
will not develop their agent further and therefore by developing an 
agent for IDS 11, we will have a clear line of separation between the 
agent developed by IBM for SC 3.1 update 2 for Solaris SPARC and this 
project's agent for IDS 11 in OHAC.