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PowerHA 7.4 HA 4.1.1 with PTF SI72362 and 7.2 HA 3.3 with PTF SI72439 brings several enhancements to the portfolio including:

• Security compliance automation that detects and disables inactive profiles across all nodes in a PowerHA environment.

• Enhanced visibility of real-time Recovery Point Objective (RPO) information

• Redesigned display session screens that take advantage of 132 column displays and provide a simplified view of replication status

Security Compliance Automation

With the increased risk of cybersecurity incidents and data breaches, many corporations have adopted a set of standard security practices including reducing risk by locating and disabling inactive user accounts across the enterprise.

Previously on IBM i, the Analyze Profile Activity (ANZPRFACT) functionality was used to find and disable user profiles that have not been used in a specified number of days. In a High Availability environment, users typically only sign-in to the production system causing user profile usage information to only be updated on the production system. After a switchover or failover in this type of environment, when the ANZPRFACT processing runs on the new primary node, many more users than just the inactive users are disabled.

With 7.2 HA 3.3 and 7.4 HA 4.1.1 PowerHA has introduced a new policy, QHA_AD_ANZCADPRF, and command, ANZCADPRF, which analyzes and caches usage information across nodes in the PowerHA environment. This capability enables users to meet security policies of disabling inactive profiles across all nodes while avoiding auditing concerns that exist with competing High Availability solutions that directly replicate usage information.

For additional information see: Disabling Inactive User Profiles

Real-time Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Information

One of the key metrics for a business continuity solution is Recovery Point Objective (RPO). A recovery point objective indicates how much data will be lost in the event of a disaster.

For synchronous solutions in a PowerHA environment, such as Metro Mirror or synchronous geographic mirroring, the recovery point objective is 0. However, synchronous solutions are limited in distance with maximum distances of around 300 kilometers. PowerHA enables replication to span the globe with asynchronous replication solutions such as Global Mirror; the trade-off for greater distances is a larger RPO.

With 7.2 HA 3.3 and 7.4 HA 4.1.1 PowerHA now provides real-time RPO information on the display session screens for IBM Spectrum Virtualize (SVC) based and IBM Copy Services Manager for DS8000 (CSM) based replication. This enables users to know their RPO.

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Simplified Session Display Screens

The Display Session screens in PowerHA display information related to replication and independent ASP status. These screens have been re-designed to take advantage of 132-column displays when available and provide a clearer indication of replication status with an arrow.

Enhancement Availability