Precisely Assure MIMIX Reviews

My main use case for Precisely Assure MIMIX is for a backup in case of disaster or a recovery or an outage.

A quick specific example of how I have used Precisely Assure MIMIX for disaster recovery or during an outage is when we had an event of weather or a circuit went down from our Telco, AT&T; we had to do a rollover to the backup box, which was located in another state, and we ran on that box for a week or until a set time, the disaster was over.

I also have another scenario to add about my main use case for Precisely Assure MIMIX: we used it as a test where we could roll, do a virtual rollover, and test a product on production data, and after the test was complete, we could roll back over and everything would be put exactly back the way it was.

The best features that Precisely Assure MIMIX offers are that it is very designed and simple to use; it just works. The screens are very designed, informative, and show you everything that you need to know about your current and backup system, and with the proper speeds across the circuit, the instant you make a change on the production box, that change shows up on the backup box. The reporting for Precisely is very good, and you can run reports that tell you information, and for audit purposes, it is excellent to mark off the list that you have a disaster recovery box, which a lot of auditors look for.

Precisely Assure MIMIX alerts you when there is an issue by sending information to your job queue or your message queue or Q-CIS OPER message queue, which are always monitored, and it allows you to send messages and be updated about any issues by the colors that are changed on the screen. There are also instant alerts, instant messages that allow you to see exactly what is happening all the time.

Precisely Assure MIMIX has positively affected our organization by reducing downtime because it takes 30 minutes from swapping from one box to another; production is back up and running within 30 minutes, and a lot of times, I could get it down to 20 minutes. I believe I also had a successful 15-minute rollover from the time I took down the production system to the time I brought the disaster recovery box back up, which is an incredible time saver, money saver, everything saver for all the plants involved in the disaster recovery process. We had a total of 10 plants that were all back up and running within a coffee break.

In terms of productivity and customer satisfaction, it was great; everybody loved the ability to roll over and have that functionality available. Many companies do not have the ability to bring production back online within minutes, especially during a critical fiber cut or a critical disk drive error, and it very much became essential to have Precisely Assure MIMIX, as without it, we would lose thousands of dollars.

Improving Precisely Assure MIMIX is going to be a really hard one; over the years, the tech support started off kind of rough but gradually got better and better as I used it often, being on a first-name basis with many of the customer service reps because of having to call with issues that they were always able to resolve fairly quickly.

I would have liked to see more reporting, maybe automation of reports, but as far as integration with other systems, I always used Precisely Assure MIMIX on an AS/400, iSeries, IBM iSeries machine, and I cannot speak to using it on any other device.

I have been using Precisely Assure MIMIX for 15 years.

Precisely Assure MIMIX is absolutely stable without a shadow of a doubt; even during the update process, I downloaded the update, stopped the product, installed the update, and it automatically did it. You could watch it; it was very thorough, simple, efficient, and stable, and I never had an issue with the product's stability.

Precisely Assure MIMIX handles growth very; we bought another company and had to add that company into the mirroring process, and it was very simple to set up. Getting them going involved a save and then a restore, and with the proper bandwidth over the internet, we could and I believe did that over the T1 line to our disaster recovery box, making the process very easy.

The customer support for Precisely Assure MIMIX was good; in the beginning, it was a little shaky, taking a while to respond and resolve issues. But over the years, their customer support became very advanced, with quicker responses, better responses, and simpler resolutions, improving significantly over time.

Neutral

I did not previously use a different solution; we searched out and looked at several different solutions, but Precisely Assure MIMIX was the one that we preferred over the others.

I have seen a return on investment with Precisely Assure MIMIX; you definitely have money savings because the savings are realized during downtime. If you have to be down for five or 10 hours overnight, you are talking hundreds or even thousands of dollars in lost production, and not being able to ship products or bill customers, so the return on investment comes from getting back online, back in business, and back to production within a matter of minutes.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Precisely Assure MIMIX is that the pricing was a little steep; I believe it could have been lower, but for what I received as far as the service, the price is pretty close. I don't remember there being any specific setup cost, just the initial cost, and the monthly maintenance fee was a little steep because if you didn't use the product a couple of times a year and didn't call maintenance or use support, it's unclear why you would need a steep maintenance cost.

Before choosing Precisely Assure MIMIX, we evaluated other options, including IBM, which was not as far along in the process and didn't have the visibility that Precisely did, so we went with Precisely instead.

My advice to others looking into using Precisely Assure MIMIX is to give it a chance; it works, is efficient, and makes your backup system a production system in a matter of minutes. You have to ensure that you test and do role swaps regularly to prepare yourself effectively.

My additional thoughts about Precisely Assure MIMIX before we wrap up are that it is a product that will work for you. You have to get a system in place, dot all the i's, and cross all the t's, but Precisely just works.

I rate Precisely Assure MIMIX 9 out of 10.

I use the solution in my company since it offers more flexibility compared to other software that I have worked with, including IBM I Cluster technology, Precisely OMS/ODS, and a little bit at the base level of MIMIXOWN. Precisely Assure MIMIX is a very old tool that I have used several times, and because of that, I feel comfortable using it.

For those companies looking into the products available in the market, I would say that nothing comes close to Precisely Assure MIMIX in terms of the functionalities and the area of usage that the tool provides.

The most valuable features of the solution are auditing and object replication. The tool takes care of the recovery part by allowing our company to use its auto-recovery features.

The high cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

The cost of the product should be reduced a little bit, especially compared to the products offered by the other vendors or competitors in the market.

I have been using Precisely Assure MIMIX for fifteen years. I use Precisely Assure MIMIX V10.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with IBM I Cluster technology, Precisely OMS/ODS, and DataMirror in some of my previous organizations. My current organization started off with DataMirror and then switched to Precisely Assure MIMIX later.

The product's initial setup phase was straightforward and simple.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I have seen a return on investment from the use of the solution in my company, especially in terms of cost, since it helps our company deal with downtime and during a disaster, the product helps us with the switchover process, owing to which such issues did not have an impact on us.

The solution helped our organization save a lot of time by ensuring that my company did not experience any downtime.

The cost of the product is too high.

My current organization is evaluating options like IBM i high availability technologies.

Precisely Assure MIMIX has improved our organization's disaster recovery efforts since my company has multiple LPARs. Precisely Assure MIMIX has around 45 LPARs for the database recovery, and I have one site-to-site replication for one of the servers in our environment, which is really good.

The failover process of Precisely Assure MIMIX has enhanced our company's business continuity planning, considering that we have been testing the failover test area once a year and found out that the area revolving around recovery is good.

When I was having a discussion on one of the online forums meant for Precisely Assure MIMIX around five years ago, which was even before the LAKEVIEW stuff was introduced by Precisely. Through the online forum, the team of Precisely Assure MIMIX helped my company deal with the area related to ServiceNow integration.

I have never faced a scenario where Precisely Assure MIMIX prevented data loss during an unexpected outage in our company.

I would ask those who plan to use the product to evaluate their own environment before purchasing Precisely Assure MIMIX.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

I utilize real-time data monitoring with Precisely Assure MIMIX. I mostly participate in the deployment process myself.

I see that the seamless synchronization feature is helpful for your organization or your customers' organization. I do use the status alerts and alerting feature with Precisely Assure MIMIX.

One thing I see as a drawback in Precisely Assure MIMIX is that deployment is quite complex and it takes time. When assessing how effective real-time backup and recovery is with this product, I think it performs quite well, but I believe that the role-swapping procedure is a bit complicated on Precisely Assure MIMIX. Perhaps you could consider how to simplify it because customers find the role swap setup is not that easy.

I entered Precisely Assure MIMIX recently, and previously, I worked for another product called QEDD.

I previously worked for another product called QEDD.

Deploying Precisely Assure MIMIX requires maybe a day or two.

This is a great question regarding whether it is a reasonable price for Precisely Assure MIMIX, but I do not have the price on hand and I do not remember the price, so I cannot say anything on this. I gave this review a rating of 8.

It is a database replication tool. It replicates one database to another database.

That's debatable. There are pros and cons to it. On the one side, it provides a very quick and easy availability of data where it is needed. On the other side, it can just end up making copies of the data at places, which makes the data difficult to manage.

It creates secondary copies of source data anywhere needed in the organization. For instance, you may have a Microsoft SQL Server database that needs some data from an Oracle database. It will make a copy of the Oracle data in the Microsoft SQL Server database. So, it can be used there, and that's the advantage. The downside to this is that it basically propagates multiple copies of the same set of data across your organization. So, you have two copies of the data instead of one copy of the data. There is also an incremental storage requirement. You need additional disk storage. There may also be business rules that are applied to multiple copies of the same data that are inconsistent with each other. 

Database replication is most valuable. It is multi-platform, so it can replicate from a variety of different database types to a variety of different database types.

It is a relatively stable database replication product.

It does data manipulation language (DML) replication, but it does not do data definition language (DDL) replication. In my opinion, it is a disadvantage. It would be nicer if it was able to do both DML and DDL. I'm not 100% certain of this, but it seems Oracle Golden Gate does both DML and DDL. MIMIX only does DML, and it would be very nice if they included DDL replication. This is one feature that would be very helpful to have. 

The other feature that would be helpful to have is the feature that I know they're already working on. Currently, the monitoring control of the product is done from a single pane interface that does not provide a holistic view of the entire enterprise. It would be useful to be able to have a monitoring and control console or dashboard that allows you to see the entire set of replication of everything that's happening in your company in one place. It currently doesn't do that, but I do know that the development team for Precisely is working to add that in an upcoming release of the product.

We set it up 15 years ago.

It is generally very stable. There are certain cases when it can become unstable, but that's usually due to the impacts that are outside its area of control. For instance, if the network that it is running on becomes unstable, that can create problems with the product itself. Similarly, if one of the databases that are being replicated has DDL type changes made to it, I don't get replicas. This can create problems with replicating to the secondary databases because the secondary databases can go out of sync with the source database.

It handles targeted, focused areas of database replication very well, but when I consider the source database that we're replicating from and I look at the size of that database and the number of objects in that database, I'm not at all sure if it would be able to handle the entire thing. In other words, if we try to use the product to replicate the entire source database to an entire copy created elsewhere, it might become a little bit unwieldy and difficult, and the performance wouldn't be great. I don't know that for sure because we've never tried to use it in more than a very focused manner. 

The source database from which we're replicating has over 4,000 table objects in it that could be replicated, but we're only using the product to replicate less than a hundred of those. It is a narrow-focused slice of the data that we're replicating. If I was asked to replicate all 4,000 tables, I'm not sure if the product would scale up to that.

There are many users who are using it, but I don't have an exact count. What we are doing in the organization right now is that we are replicating a focused slice of our monster source database. We're replicating 10 copies of that data throughout the organization. Each of the recipients of that replicated data in the organization is using it for a very specific business function. For instance, we provide data for the data warehouse to report against. We provide data for product information management to process. We provide data for our eCommerce site to be able to transact orders online and so forth. It is pervasive in the organization. There are basically 10 copies of the same set of data throughout the organization. Each of those copies is used for a very specific business function. So, it impacts a very large swath of the organization, including our sales force, which has at least hundreds of people. In terms of the users, people who are impacted by this in their jobs are probably between 500 and 1,000.

It is being used very extensively throughout the organization. I personally don't have any plans and I'm not aware of any plans to expand or increase its usage. It is at a state right now where if a new business requirement comes along or there's a new project somewhere in the business that needs additional data propagated to one of the current recipients of the data or a new recipient of the data, we would do that on a one-by-one basis. Currently, there is no project in place to increase or expand the overall usage of the product. There is certainly a strong lobby in the company that feels that by having so many copies of the same set of data throughout the organization, we are going in the wrong direction. There are people in the organization who would like to see its usage reduced and have a different architecture to get access to the same data without necessarily having to copy that data to multiple places. So, there are no current plans to expand the usage of the product. There is probably a desire among at least some individuals to reduce the usage of the product.

It is okay. I would rate them a little bit above average. Some of the support resources they have are very good, and some of them are maybe not as experienced as they need to be. It seems to be hit or miss when we create a support case. Sometimes, we get somebody who's on the ball and knows exactly how to handle the issue and when it needs to be escalated for resolution. Other times, we've got support people who aren't necessarily as savvy or technically able to assist. Overall, their support is better than average. It is not the best I've ever seen, but it's not bad.

The different solution that was in use before this product was a product called DataMirror, and it was a different third-party vendor. The transition from DataMirror to MIMIX took place when I joined the company. The project was in progress when I joined the company, and I was immediately assigned to the team to assist with that. My understanding of the reason why they chose to discontinue using DataMirror and to replace it with MIMIX was a dramatic increase in the licensing cost of DataMirror. My understanding at the time was that DataMirror had become prohibitively expensive for licensing and support. The company was looking for a more economical solution, and that's how they landed on the MIMIX Share product.

On the Windows platform, it is very straightforward. It is just like an installation wizard. It is also pretty straightforward on other platforms. We're using it on AIX as well, and it's not complicated, but it's a little bit more involved to install it there than it is on Microsoft Windows.

It was basically deployed as part of a much larger project. The larger project was basically a three-year development and deployment process. It took multiple years to get the larger project deployed. 

Our implementation strategy was to simply provide the replication capability through all the phases of development. We started with what's called a configuration development environment, and when we were ready to move it into user acceptance testing and quality assurance testing, we moved the replication into the next environment. After we were ready to go live, we moved it into the production environment.

We set it up 15 years ago, and we haven't really used professional services or a consulting party since then. There have been cases where we had to engage product support for certain issues that we encountered. As with any software product, there have been bugs in the software that needed to be corrected. So, we had to engage their product support team and give them cases of things where we felt the product wasn't doing as it should. They would examine it and reproduce the issues. If they determined that it was a bug in the software, they issued patches to fix the issues over the years. There hasn't been a professional services engagement with them since the implementation 15 years ago.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have a staff of about half a dozen people. Four of those people are conversant in the product. It takes less than a dozen people to deploy, support, and maintain the product.

I have lost track of that over the years because I don't handle that piece of it. I believe the licensing model has changed as the company has been acquired by Precisely. Its licensing has changed over the 15 year period we've been using the product, and I don't handle that anymore. I don't receive or approve payment of those invoices.

The licensing provides the access to support. I do know that there's an annual charge for being able to call into their support line and get a technical team from Precisely to assist with any issues we may have. I don't think there are any additional costs other than what we incur internally in terms of the infrastructure that we need to run and operate the product.

At the time we went with MIMIX, there weren't a lot of other competitors out there. 15 years ago, one of the requirements that we had was that our source database was iSeries DB2400. There weren't a lot of database replication products that were playing in that area. The choice to go with MIMIX from DataMirror was made before I joined the company, and then I was thrust into that project as soon as I joined the company. So, I don't know if any other products were evaluated when that decision was first made, but I do know that there weren't very many companies that were doing the replication of iSeries DB2400 data.

As we're using it right now, we are no longer replicating DB2400 data. We are replicating Oracle data. There are more competitors that are working in that space. We had evaluated other solutions when we transitioned from DB2400 to Oracle. We did evaluations of Golden Gate and another third-party product called Quest SharePlex, and for whatever reason at levels of management above me, the decision was made to stay with MIMIX rather than to transition to one of those other competitors.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It has certain deficiencies, but generally, it is quite stable if environmental factors outside of its area don't change in an adverse way that has a negative impact on it. When it is running without outside factors impacting it negatively, it is quite stable. It is a set-it-and-forget-it type of implementation, which is a plus. It is nice to be able to just put something in and not have to worry about it, but in the real world, when things happen that do have an adverse or negative impact on it, then it does require maintenance, support, care, and feeding. So, in the real world, we do have to support it, but overall, it is relatively stable, and for that reason, I'd give it an above-average evaluation. I wouldn't give it a perfect evaluation because there are certain deficiencies in the product, and there are certain bugs that have to be corrected and that have been corrected over time. It is not perfect, but it is reasonably stable.