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.