IBM Global Mailbox - overview

IBM® Global High Availability Mailbox is a robust and reliable way to store message data from partners in any geographical area. As a component of IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, Global Mailbox enables customers who have licensed to optionally buy an add-on component that provides a high availability mailbox to exchange files. With the HA mailbox capability clients can deploy a B2B platform that can sustain continuous operations. Global Mailbox also offers differentiating disaster recovery capabilities.

Global Mailbox provides data storage across geographically distributed locations. Data is routed to the nearest available server, and replicated quickly across data centers so that data is available even if a data center is not accessible. Applications that are enabled for Global Mailbox listen for mailbox events to trigger application level actions for initiating further processing.

Global Mailbox can be enabled in the following applications:

• IBM Sterling B2B Integrator
• IBM Sterling File Gateway
• IBM Control Center

Global Mailbox provides a fault tolerant architecture where incoming data is replicated in near real-time to other data centers. This allows for high performing and scalable solutions or alternatively, an application-level disaster recovery solution that eliminates the need to develop solutions outside of the application. Also, by using load balancing, you can seamlessly connect a trading partner data to the nearest available data center for transfers and to balance the processing across data centers. This solution provides capability to specify which trading partner data is geographically distributed in addition to configurable capabilities to decide when this replication happens – immediately to ensure data always exists in at least two places, or delayed to provide the best response time to the trading partner. This solution provides a consistent view across all data centers in a disaster recovery scenario. This ensures that users have access to the data without interruption to the business or manual intervention by the administrator.