IBM PowerHA

Background

IBM PowerHA was my first project at IBM. We were the first design team in our department -Systems. We were tasked with this project where we needed to redesign an old legacy software based on our revamped user needs.

IBM® PowerHA® technology provides high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery. It enables you to deploy an HA solution that addresses both storage and high availability requirements with one integrated configuration, which offers robust performance along with a simplified user interface.

PowerHA provides the most comprehensive, integrated self managing High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution that covers all types of outages (planned and unplanned).

The problem

  • Customers see PowerHA as overly complex potentially leading them to choose a competitor  product or abandon AIX altogether. 
  • PowerHA’s complexity acts as a barrier to customers who might otherwise consider an HA solution but do not have the time or resources to install and manage the solution.
  • Mission critical, time sensitive applications require high availability solutions to ensure that applications continue to run with little or no downtime due to planned or unplanned outages.
  • In the event of a disaster, customers need to resume operations at alternate and remote locations. The IT industry is increasingly moving toward regular disaster recovery testing; IT operations teams need to easily conduct disaster recovery rehearsals as frequently as needed.

“As-Is” state

Exploration and inspiration

Envision

Hills and personas

1
2
3
1

Hill 1 : At a Glance Health
Monica, an HA Monitoring expert, can view the health and status of physical and virtual HA components that are most important to her at the moment, in one place and in real-time.

2

Hill 2 : Insightful and Comprehensive Troubleshooting

Tom, an HA System Administrator, can access relevant log information  in a single filtered view even if a node is down without the need for script files or IBM Support resources.

3

Hill 3 : Simple Updates and Migration

Simmy, an HA Installation and Migration Systems Administrator, can update and migrate PowerHA on the whole cluster with no operating system dependencies or service disruptions.

My design procedure

Example demonstrated here is Hill 1 Monitoring Dashboard for All Clusters

Design Divergence and Convergence

Design Iteration and Refinement Based on User Feedback

More Design Iteration and Refinement Based on User Feedback

Interactive prototypes

I coded small interactive prototypes that could explain the behaviors of our design to our users more meaningfully. These also helped the development team understand our final concept much better.

Displaying a notification 

In this prototype I tried to show how a notification can be displayed when certain action is in progress.

Nesting menu behavior 

I designed a dynamic multilevel menu which content needed to be organized based on screen size. This animation show some of the behavior of the menu.

Add/delete menu items

This simple interaction shows how to add an menu item or reorganize them as necessary.