iTera Beefs Up iSeries HA App with MQ, Auditing Features

by Alex Woodie

Companies with a need for OS/400 high availability software that supports WebSphere MQ can now add iTera to their list of potential providers. Last week at the COMMON conference in San Antonio, iTera announced the general availability of Echo2 V4R1, which, in addition to supporting WebSphere MQ, includes a redesigned auditing process that iTera says is so advanced that it can't say much about it, for fear of helping its competitors.

Echo2 is one of the new breed of OS/400 high availability software products that rely entirely on IBM's remote journaling technology as its underlying replication method. Since Salt Lake City-based iTera brought Echo2 to market, in late 2001 and early 2002, it has regularly enhanced the product with advanced capabilities required by large OS/400 shops, such as clustering, which iTera introduced with Echo2 V3R1 more than a year ago.

WebSphere MQ (formerly MQ Series) was one of the capabilities on iTera's hit list of features to support in Echo2. The company wanted to support the technology not only because it opened the door to larger, more sophisticated, and richer OS/400 customers that use WebSphere MQ to link applications running on disparate systems, and who want to protect the data and applications on those servers through replication, but also because WebSphere MQ support is one of the features that IBM requires its high availability software vendors to have if they want to be able to provide certain value-added discounts on hardware to their customers. Clustering was also on that list from IBM.

iTera introduced a new patent-pending auditing process with Echo2 V4R1 that it says is so advanced that it can't say much about it. What is known is that the new auditing process verifies the accuracy of iSeries objects replication at the record level, and that iTera claims that it "raises the bar on the accuracy and reliability of mirrored objects for high availability products."

High availability replication must be periodically checked to ensure the integrity of the data and the objects as they are transferred from source to secondary machine. "We're not willing to publicly divulge many of the new capabilities of Echo2 V4R1, because we don't want to alert our competitors," says Dan Neville, iTera's president. "Suffice it to say, these new features greatly enhance our already game-changing iSeries high availability solution."

(This isn't the first time that iTera has gone mum when talking about the inner workings of its products. Two years ago, company officials politely refused to go into the details of how its new Reorganize in Place feature of its Reorganize While Active V3R1 worked (see "iTera Boosts Performance of OS/400 File Reorg Tool," for fear of tipping off its competitors.)

Other new features in Echo2 V4R1 include new system analysis and setup tools that iTera says cuts the pre-installation process from two or three days to just a few hours. New alerts have also been added that warn users when any "system critical" object on the primary system is not being replicated. Lastly, iTera says that role swaps and failovers can be performed more quickly and more easily with this release, and that operators now can get assurance from the product that all objects and devices are reliably in place on the backup machine.

"This new release of Echo2 has added scores of new features and functions that dramatically expand the product's capabilities," Neville says. "At a time when our competitors are scaling down functionality to create 'lite' versions of their software to meet the price points of Echo2, we are doing anything but scaling down."

If it sounds like iTera is beating its chest a little, that's because it is. The company's confidence has grown in proportion to the size of its customer list. In 2003, the company landed 100 new customers, a 500 percent increase from 2002, and it expects the number of Echo2 users to double in 2004, the company says. What's more, iTera says that more than one-third of its new customers in 2003 bought Echo2 to replace high availability software.

While iTera doesn't have an installed base as large as its firmly entrenched competitors, its message of low-price, easy-to-use high availability software has been instrumental in opening a large, untapped market for affordable high availability software, which, company officials say, could soon be used by as much as 30 percent of OS/400 shops, far more than the 5 percent market penetration that industry observers said existed in 2002. As with all good ideas, others are jumping on the bandwagon, and even entrenched vendors are bringing to market remote journaling-based high availability software that they say are low in cost and easy to use.