IBM® Db2® pureScale® on Amazon Web Services is now available.

Today, during the International Db2 User Group (IDUG) conference in Boston, MA, we announced a major milestone for Db2 — the immediate availability of IBM® Db2® pureScale® on Amazon Web Services.

Mission-critical workloads require continuous availability at scale. With best-in-class failure detection and recovery, you can eliminate unplanned downtime while achieving high performance with IBM Db2 pureScale. pureScale leverages the IBM Db2 parallel sysplex architecture, providing mainframe-class continuous availability that runs anywhere, whenever you need it. 

Why IBM Db2 pureScale on AWS?  

• Simple, IBM-certified cloud deployment: IBM takes the guesswork out of deploying Db2 pureScale to the public cloud.
• Extreme capacity: Scale with near-linear efficiency and high predictability. IBM Db2 pureScale enables scaling starting with a small cluster, allowing you to grow your workloads up to the level you need. On AWS, several pre-configured cluster sizes are available to suit your desired throughput requirements. Deploying with a pre-configured size is completely automated and completed within minutes of the provisioning of AWS EC2 instances.
• Highly resilient, transactional data: pureScale® leverages the IBM Db2 parallel sysplex architecture, providing mainframe-class continuous availability that runs anywhere, whenever you need it. With AWS inherent redundancy in the network component, the pureScale cluster is even more resilient to certain types of failure compared to on-premises deployment — with no additional cost to maintain the highly resilient infrastructure.
• Application transparency: IBM Db2 pureScale provides application transparency through automatic load balancing across all active members. Achieve optimal resource utilization at all times, keeping application response times low while reducing the risk and cost of application changes.
• Build more, manage less: With IBM Db2 pureScale, there are no application changes to make, data to redistribute or performance tuning to do. Whether this is a new deployment on AWS, a move from on-premises pureScale to AWS or a shift from on-premises or AWS single Db2 instance to pureScale on AWS, applications work just as they did before. Applications benefit from enhanced network resiliency, extreme capacity and continuous availability from the moment that they connect to the pureScale cluster on AWS.

Use cases 

With the pureScale feature on AWS, many existing on-premises practices can be greatly simplified with the below use cases:

Operational efficiency

Once the rough sizing of your cluster is determined, the time-consuming cluster readiness on-premises can be shortened from week(s)/month(s) to minutes with a one-click automated deployment in the cloud. Db2 pureScale on AWS leverages AWS CloudFormation to handle the EC2 instances, network, multi-attached share storage, Db2 install and instance setup on all hosts.

Provision a five-host pureScale cluster (three members and two CFs) in just 30-40 minutes, including the deployment of all EC2 instances, installation the Db2 pureScale software and cluster setup. 

Lower TCO

Reduce time and resource costs with optimized cluster readiness, new level validations, and setup of redeployment and disaster recovery in minutes.

By and large, Db2 pureScale’s new level validations focus mostly on compatibility with existing applications and are cluster interconnect agnostic, meaning that whether the on-premises deployments use RDMA or not is irrelevant to the validations. These use cases are prime candidates to move to pureScale on AWS to avoid the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware stack. When the need to validate a new level arises, simply spin up as many new pureScale clusters as needed to perform the validation and destroy them once the validation is completed.  

If your current on-premises deployment utilizes AWS S3 for backup, restore, load and ingest on a regular basis, moving the pureScale cluster to AWS can lower total storage costs with reduced in-bound and out-bound network traffic. If you are currently running pureScale on-premises and not utilizing S3 today, the pureScale feature on AWS provides a low-cost, resilient storage option for your data in the public cloud.

Disaster recovery at scale

In addition to Db2 pureScale providing five-nines high-availability within a single availability zone (AZ), disaster recovery covers the last mile availability in the event of a local AZ or region failure. With pureScale, the de-facto disaster recovery strategy is HADR, where a second pureScale cluster is setup in a different AZ of the same region. In less than an hour, the instance will be ready for HADR setup with just a one-click deployment.

Transferrable skills 

For seasoned on-premises Db2 pureScale users, the cluster on AWS has the same look and feel. Procedures for cluster management, online software updates, host maintenance, instance and databases monitoring, performance tuning, problem determination and troubleshooting techniques, etc. are all transferrable. 

Next steps

If you are looking to support your mission-critical applications with the extreme availability and effortless scalability that Db2 provides in the public cloud, then Db2 pureScale on AWS is the solution for you.

Ready to take the next step? Get started with Db2 pureScale on AWS today.

Questions? Contact an IBM Db2 expert today or call 1-866-426-4254.