PowerHA SystemMirror pricing, third-party logical replication vendors, warm vs hot standby economics, and where backup and security software licensing fits in.

HA/DR software is one of the least transparent line items in an IBM i budget. IBM publishes some PowerHA reference figures; the third-party logical replication vendors that compete with it -- Maxava, Rocket iCluster, and the legacy iTera/Vision Solutions/MIMIX lineage -- do not publish list pricing at all. Here's what's actually known, and what to ask for when it isn't.

PowerHA SystemMirror for i

Base LicenseFrom ~$4,495

SMB Implementation$5,000 - $20,000

Enterprise Implementation$50,000+

Metered Cloud Rate$0.336 - $0.528 per instance-hour

PowerHA is OS-integrated, offered in Standard and Enterprise editions, and is IBM's own answer to logical replication and clustering. The metered hourly rate is aimed at burst or temporary DR capacity rather than an always-on production mirror.

Third-party logical replication vendors

Third-party IBM i HA/DR vendors

Vendor	Product	Pricing Model
Maxava	Maxava HA / Maxava Cloud	Monthly fee scaled by source machine's software tier (P-group); not published
Rocket Software	Rocket iCluster	Quote-based, not published
Legacy Vision Solutions / Fresche	iTera / MIMIX lineage	Quote-based, ownership has shifted -- confirm current vendor before quoting

None of these vendors publish a fixed price list. Maxava holds roughly 3.9% and Rocket roughly 2.4% reported market share in the IBM i HA space as directional context, not a pricing signal.

Warm standby vs hot standby

Backup-only

Lowest software licensing cost. Highest recovery time -- often hours to a full day depending on data volume and restore method.

Warm standby

Data is replicated to a second system that is powered but not actively serving production. Reduces licensing and hardware cost vs. hot standby at the price of a longer failover window.

Hot standby

A fully licensed, continuously running mirror. Highest software and hardware cost, but failover measured in minutes rather than hours.

Backup and security stack costs

IBM's native save/restore and BRMS (Backup, Recovery and Media Services) are included with the IBM i OS license at no separate software-tier cost -- your operational cost there scales with tape or cloud storage and retention policy, not licensing. Security and compliance tooling (exit-point monitoring, MFA, encryption, SIEM integration), historically from vendors under the HelpSystems/Fortra and Precisely/PowerTech umbrellas, follows the same quote-based, per-LPAR-or-per-user pattern as the HA vendors above. Ask for an itemized quote -- some resellers bundle backup, security, and HA into a single annual number that makes it hard to see which component is actually driving cost.

Because none of the major third-party HA/DR and security vendors publish list pricing, the single highest-leverage move in this category is getting two competing quotes against the identical configuration before committing.

IBM i High Availability & Disaster Recovery Cost Comparison