System iNetwork

September 2, 2008

A Vision for the Future

Recently, Vision Solutions has decided to take the plunge into the wide world of AIX. By doing so, they hope to capitalize on an oft-forgotten market: Power users.

In a recent announcement, Vision stated that their EchoCluster and EchoStream products will now be available on AIX. The two products are an outgrowth of their acquisition of Lakeview Technology and formerly known under the Mimix brand.

EchoCluster for AIX keeps your applications up and running through continuous server monitoring and immediate, automated failover to a local or remotely located alternate server. The solution continuously seeks out potential problems at the hardware, software, and network levels to decrease downtime as much as possible.

EchoStream for AIX is a continuous data-protection and disaster-recovery solution that replicates data to a remote location or local server. The new AIX release can simplify customers migration of data between dedicated I or P power servers to IBMs new blade offerings so that organizations can run more applications on a single server.

The solution’s “snapshot” capability means that users can roll back data to different points in time for various department needs. For example, roll back to the end of the day for shipping information and to the month-end for payroll processing.

Combining these two products with the company’s classic favorite, Replicate1 (a data mining ETL solution), which recently experienced a nice facelift after Vision’s purchase of Lakeview, the product line now boasts a wealth of opportunity for companies looking to move from to blade servers and Power systems.

When I recently talked with Henry Martinez, Senior Vice President of Engineering, he was really excited about what this move to AIX means for Power users, saying that Vision is happy to have these HA options for heterogeneous environments running an I or p as a backend and other servers as the front-end: “now, our customers can have high availability and business resiliency on both sides of the house.” One of our European customers can actually role swap their entire Windows, Linux, and i servers at the same time.”

To read about some companies using the new AIX-compatible products, check out
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_JacksonClinic_E.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_FirstFuture_E.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_MIMIX_ESAIX_TonysFineFoods_E.pdf http://www.visionsolutions.com/Downloads/Case-Studies/CS_ESAIX_DKSH_IE.pdf
http://www.visionsolutions.com/Products/Disaster-Recovery-EchoStream.aspx

Most exciting, though, is what these new, lower-priced options mean for possible Power converts. Martinez explained that, as Power box prices have gone down, a new breed of customer (who couldn’t afford the servers before) can now have access to the latest and greatest. But that doesn’t mean they have a bigger budget, so by making EchoStream and EchoCluster easier to install and maintain, fewer professional services are required to get it up and running and keep it running consistently. While Vision still offers 24X7 support to customers, the hope is that, with the new easier-to-operate options, users can rely lesson CustomerCare for nominal business operations.

And importantly, the Echostream solution is storage-agnostic, so it can work with any existing storage solution, no matter the maker, which also makes the switch to Power much easier for management to stomach.

So, not only can new users now move to the box for less, but now they can also keep them running and available for less. Now that’s a vision to believe in…

--Erin Bradford, systems management & availability editor

Posted by ebradford at September 2, 2008 8:17 AM