IBM (News - Alert) has combined mainframe-like continuous availability and disaster recovery capabilities to global data centers with the introduction of Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) 11 code-named “Cheetah.”

 

The new IDS 11 is capable of delivering a combination of increased performance, reliability and scalability and handling massive volumes of complex data at very high speeds.

 

With IDS 11, customers can enhance information management for their cluster server environments using technology borrowed from IBM’s mainframe systems. Thus, IDS 11 becomes the first data server in the industry to provide clustered data centers with continuous data availability and disaster recovery irrespective of the geographic location or distance between backup data center sites.

 

IDS 11 has truly enriched IBM’s end-to-end data server lineup in the industry, less than a year after unveiling the DB2 9 Viper data server. IDS 11 is expected to further expand IBM’s fast-growing database business, which generated double-digit revenue growth in 1Q 2007 and gained share versus the competition.

 

“IDS 11 performs right out of the box and enables customers to quickly react to changing market demands by providing uninhibited access to important business information,” said Arvind Krishna, vice president IBM data servers. “With near hands-free administration, greater reliability and its global availability feature, IDS 11 offers companies superior data center performance at the lowest total cost of ownership.”

 

IDS 11 comes with Advanced Access Control, which incorporates industry-leading technology first introduced in DB2 9 Viper, including cell, column and row level label based access control (LBAC) for more secured data accesses. LBAC is a unique data access capability that provides an extremely flexible means of defining security hierarchies and classification levels. LBAC then helps users apply these definitions to the information that is being managed. The new labeling capability provides new ways to control access to sensitive data stored within the database.

 

Another significant feature in IDS 11 is the ability to offer an even greater reduction in hands-on database administration, freeing up DBA resources to address other business needs, as well as enabling integration of administration functions within an application, making IDS invisible to applications that do not want database awareness in their solutions. A new SQL-based Admin API monitors and performs administrative tasks within and across applications and a new data query scheduler monitors events and resources, collecting statistics for automated reporting.

 

The IDS 11 is ideal for smaller companies and organizations that count on uninterrupted information access, but don’t have adequate IT staffs to manage numerous data server instances. For example, online gaming provider, WorldWinner, is looking to IDS 11 to support its Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) games.

 

“Informix Dynamic Server has helped make us the predominant site on the Internet for skill-based game tournaments, we’re seeing such extreme performance improvements that our speeds are now serving as a benchmark in the industry,” said Joe Bai, Chief Information Officer, WorldWinner. “With IDS ‘Cheetah,’ it’s almost as if Informix built a new release just for me. Informix has given us a path toward better response time, and a low-cost means of growth.”