High availability is not a “nice-to-have” for IBM i environments. For organizations running critical workloads, downtime tolerance continues to shrink while expectations for resilience continue to rise. As ATS Group expanded its IBM i hosting services through ATS Power Cloud, high availability became a critical requirement for supporting production workloads. Supporting production IBM i workloads across geographically separated data centers required a solution that delivered fast replication, predictable failover, and operational simplicity without unnecessary complexity or cost.
This post outlines how ATS approached that challenge and built a high availability strategy that supports both operational reliability and client confidence.
The Challenge: High Availability at Scale Without Excess Complexity
ATS Power Cloud manages IBM i environments for customers across North America, operating workloads across two physically separate data centers to support geographic resilience.
While that architecture provided the foundation, it also introduced a critical requirement. Data needed to be replicated efficiently and reliably between sites, with the ability to fail over quickly in the event of an outage or disaster.
At the same time, the solution had to meet several practical criteria:
- Support diverse IBM i environments and OS levels
- Avoid operational overhead that would slow response or increase risk
- Deliver predictable costs for ATS and its customers
- Scale as demand for high availability continued to grow
Many high-availability platforms deliver strong technical capabilities, but often at the expense of complexity, cost, or operational friction. ATS needed a solution that aligned with how its teams operate and how its customers consume services.
The Architectural Decision: Choosing the Right High Availability Partner
When evaluating high availability software for IBM i, ATS prioritized substance over feature sprawl. The goal was not to deploy the most complex tool, but the most effective one.
Maxava HA emerged as the right fit within the ATS Power Cloud architecture based on several factors:
- Efficient, low-overhead replication in both synchronous and asynchronous modes
- Minimal replication backlogs, even under sustained write activity
- Clear visibility through an intuitive management interface
- Flexibility to support multiple replication topologies
- Licensing that aligned with real-world operational needs
According to John Byers, Director of Managed Services at ATS Group, familiarity and trust also played a role. ATS had prior experience with Maxava in earlier IBM i hosting environments, which reduced risk and accelerated deployment.
“The product works, it does what we need, and it fits how we operate,” Byers notes. “If there were something clearly better, we would evaluate it. But we have not seen that.”
Supporting More Than Availability: Migration and Cloud Transitions
High availability became even more valuable as ATS Power Cloud began supporting customer migrations from on-prem IBM i systems into hosted environments.
Traditional restore-based migrations can require extended downtime, especially for customers with large data volumes. By using replication to move data incrementally, ATS was able to reduce migration windows and business disruption significantly.
Flexible Maxava licensing also allowed ATS to support short-term replication use cases for data migration projects, expanding the value of the solution beyond steady-state high availability.
This capability has become increasingly important as more organizations reassess on-prem infrastructure and explore hosted or cloud-based IBM i options.
Operational Discipline and Skills Matter
High availability outcomes depend as much on execution as technology. ATS applies consistent engineering practices across all IBM i environments, grounded in deep platform expertise and operational discipline.
Every deployment is designed around the specific characteristics of the client’s workload, data structures, and recovery objectives. Validation and testing are built into the process to ensure replication and failover behave as expected before environments are placed into production.
This approach allows ATS to deliver reliable high availability while maintaining flexibility across a wide range of IBM i configurations.
The Result: Confidence, Reliability, and Growth
By integrating Maxava HA into its ATS Power Cloud architecture, ATS delivers a high availability solution that balances resilience, performance, and cost.
For additional context, this deployment is referenced in a partner-published case study by Maxava. View the case study.
Customers gain the confidence that their IBM i workloads are protected and recoverable. ATS gains a scalable foundation that supports hosting growth, cloud migrations, and evolving client requirements.
High availability is no longer viewed as an optional add-on. It is a core component of how ATS designs and delivers IBM i services.
