Integrated Data Solutions for IBM IDS Cheetah

Below you fill find the presentation and some additional notes about the latest Chat with the Labs talk held by Jerry Keesee (Director of the IBM Informix Lab) and Syed Kamal (CEO Gillani Inc.). The webcast covered why IBM IDS Cheetah is the optimal choice for integrated data solutions.

Integrated Data Solutions for IBM IDS Cheetah

Short Summary and some additional Notes

Jerry pointed out that IDS is a strategic data server inside IBM's Information Management Portfolio. Considering the outstanding IDS license growth of about 30 % in 2006 and the superior technology of IDS, I would even go one step further and say:

Informix Dynamic Server is the IBM data server with the greatest potential 
in a highly competitive database market.

Why are customers relying upon IDS ?

• Extremly High Reliability
• Nearly Hands-free, scalable Administration
• Blazing-fast (out of the box) OLTP Perfomance
• Extensive Platform Coverage

But keep in mind:

There are even many more reasons why IDS is the optimal choice not only 
for integrated solutions.

High Availability

High Availability has always been a major focus in IDS. Informix introduced the industry leading HDR (HighAvailability Data Replication) in 1993 with Informix Online Version 6. At that point DB2 LUW has not even be born and Oracle was far away from offering such a sophisticated availability solution. The HDR technology has become more and more mature during many years of use in highly critical production environments.

With Cheetah IBM adds the concept of RSS nodes (Remote Standalone Secondary) to the HDR technology. This gives customers even more flexibility for load balancing and failover strategies. The latest Open Beta software drop contains this interesting and useful new concept and an upcoming free web based training will cover this feature:

Free Training: Remote Standalone Secondary (RSS)

In combination with ER (Enterprise Replication), IDS allows the creation of a flexible, fault-tolerant network of autonomous data servers.

IDS at Work - Some real Examples

The German Soccer League (Bundesliga) relies upon the outstanding IDS replication technology. All statistical information for many years is stored in an IDS database. According to the software vendor - Cairos technologies AG - no other database could match the challenging requirements of this system.

Another interesting sweet spot for IDS is the fast growing online gaming industry. One of the leading providers in this area is World Winner which hosts 600.000 games a day. Joe Bai, CIO of World Winner:

"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."

A telecom company has 200-300 systems on approx. 20.000 cpu's running. Their helpdesk system has 426.000 concurrent sessions (with 142.000 individual users) on a 12 CPU SMP machine.

This example demonstrates the outstanding scalability of the 
IDS Multithreading Architecture.
It would be interesting to see how much more CPU power would be necessary to
handle the same number of sessions with an Oracle or DB2 data server. 

Cheetah Beta Test at Gillani

Syed Kamal, the CEO of Gillani Inc. reported an extreme good feedback from Cheetah Open Beta testing.

The runtime of a complex report with over 100 tables accessed has been reduced from 415 seconds to 75 seconds.

Customers of Gillani report that they only need a quarter of DBA resources to manage IDS instances in comparision to other data servers. This approves the great experiences that many other customers already made with IDS in their daily business.