Maximum Availability Gives Away Free HA Software

Published: February 21, 2006

by Alex Woodie

OS/400 shops that have been hesitant to dip their toes into the high availability waters may have finally met their match. Maximum Availability this month is rolling out a new version of its HA software called *noMAX Scout geared toward helping users become familiar with remote journaling-based data replication. The New Zealand outfit is giving Scout to customers completely free of charge, with no strings attached--unless you count that bungee cord tied around the '400. That's part of the company's crazy new ad campaign.

In the last five years, tremendous progress has been made in the field of OS/400 high availability. Previously only the domain of large iSeries and AS/400 shops that could afford the high six-digit license fee, high availability software has come down in price, largely thanks to the introduction of products built on remote journaling, such as Maximum Availability's *noMAX. At the same time that HA software has become more affordable, HA software vendors have strived to simplify the software through the addition of wizards and GUI management consoles, as they all look for an edge in the fight for new small and midsize customers.

While Maximum Availability (along with Salt Lake City-based iTera) deserves much of the credit of this down-market movement of HA software, the company obviously wasn't satisfied with how things stood going into 2006. Maximum Availability has grown by leaps and bounds the last few years, and has dozens of partners around the world, including an alliance with Avnet, an influential iSeries distributor, a partnership with SunGard, the large disaster recovery and hot site provider, and a lucrative value-add (finally) from IBM.

By all appearances, Maximum Availability's *noMAX is at or near the steepest part of its customer adoption curve, with all the benefits and challenges that growth entails. The company has already offered free 30-day trials of its products, which you can download and install over the Internet. And now the company is prepared to kick it up a notch by giving away its software with *noMAX Scout. Why on earth would the company do this?

As Andrew Mansfield, the company's new vice president of marketing, explains, *noMAX Scout is all about evangelizing the benefits of iSeries data replications, and seeding the market for future growth.

"If iSeries customers haven't had experience with high availability or disaster recovery software, this gives them the opportunity to use it and see what a replication solution can do," says Mansfield, who joined the company about six months ago. "This isn't a trial--it's a high availability or disaster recovery product that you can use."

As you might expect, there are some restrictions on the new offering compared to other members of Maximum Availability's product family. Perhaps most importantly, *noMAX Scout is limited to one apply group, which means the software can only be used to protect one stream of data (as opposed to dozens of apply groups, as a user of the full product may use). Also, it doesn't do dynamic file creates, which means if a new file is added to the library you're replicating, you'll need to tell *noMAX about it manually before it's replicated.

Scout also just provides data replication, and doesn't replicate objects, which means it doesn't provide protection for things like programs, user names, data areas, and data queues. These are all features that you will find in the company's for-fee products, including the *noMAX Sentry, Defender, and Garrison products (although, interestingly, the company moved away from the practice of charging for software based on the number of apply groups with the launch of is new product suite last June--see "Maximum Availability Unveils New HA and DR Products").

Mansfield sees several uses for this product, including providing data replication to organizations that have an immediate need for this capability. But most of all, *noMAX Scout is intended as a test bed for future users of high availability software. "It's a good platform and tool to provide that level of familiarity to determine if it's a tool that's going to fit their organization and its needs."

Education is a big component of Scout's existence. "We're trying to make people aware, of the end-to-end cost of downtime," Mansfield says. "We're finding when people are serious about putting together a business continuity plan, they're thinking about the end-to-end costs, from a tangible and intangible point of view. When the data is not there, there is lost credibility. Those intangible costs are not easy to quantify, but nevertheless significant."

Regulatory compliance has also earned an obligatory mention in the high availability debate. In addition to protecting data from disasters, high availability software can play a role in protecting organizations from the long arm of the law by ensuring the availability of data. "Generally, organizations need to assure that they're watertight. They need to make sure not just that their books are squeaky clean," Mansfield says. "You can't just say you lost all the data."

Maximum Availability is betting that Scout will serve as a springboard for its other products. Once customers see what's possible with Scout, the company hopes they will upgrade to *noMAX Sentry, Defender, or Garrison, which range in price from about $5,000 to $20,000 or more.

The company has also kicked off a new ad campaign that features the iSeries in various madcap adventures, including bungee jumping, river rafting, and "Zorbing," in which people (or eServer iSeries servers, as the case may be) crawl into a giant see-through sphere that's rolled down a hill. As part of this campaign, the company is also sponsoring a caption-writing contest, and it's giving away GPS systems and MP3 players to the winners.

Much of the credit of the new campaign goes to Mansfield, a Kiwi who has spent the last 10 years working in Australia as an executive for IT providers such as EDS. Mansfield explains how the company's activities--including the free *noMAX Scout software, the awareness campaign, the ongoing seminars and Webinars, the hiring of new sales people in the U.S. and Europe, and continuing to work with resellers--are part of an interconnected whole. "At the end of the day [you need to] do something that's easy and real," he says, referring to Scout. "Then that is combined with continued education, awareness. All of those things are integrated and come together."

*noMAX Scout can be downloaded now at www.maximumavailability.com/scout/download.aspx.