Vision Solutions Ships Orion, Industry's First Cross-Platform HA

by Alex Woodie

After two years of development, Vision Solutions last week began shipping Orion, the computer industry's first high availability suite for multiple platforms. With Orion, Vision is tackling the growing interdependence of dissimilar servers in IT shops, where, for example, a Windows application serves data housed in DB2/400 and each server requires its own high availability solution and personnel. The Orion suite includes nine product offerings that offer a range of managed availability capabilities for OS/400, Linux, and Windows environments.

Coordinating the failover of complex applications, running different components on different servers, is paramount to the idea of Orion, says David Wegman, an executive vice president at the Irvine, California, company. "You wouldn't failover an application between two [unlike] servers," Wegman says. "That makes no sense. But you would want to provide a coordinated failover for interdependent applications.

"For example, J.D. Edwards OneWorld," Wegman continues. "The database is on iSeries, and there's a Windows application server. If you lose a Windows application server, you might as well as lose the '400. What Orion lets you do is coordinate the failover activities of the Windows and iSeries servers. If the Windows application server is going to failover, you would certainly want to let the iSeries database server know about it. That's the type of stuff Orion is up to."

Orion is not a single product but a range of products, based on mix-and-match components that Vision developed to satisfy a range of functionality. (In some cases, Vision already had the functionality and is just repackaging it with Orion.) Vision refers to this range of functionality required as the "managed availability" curve, and has a graph of it showing regular tape backups and RAID near the bottom and failovers and clustering at the top. Vision has traditionally targeted the mid-to-upper echelons of this curve, and one of the important aspects of Orion is that Vision now offers tailored managed availability solutions to small and midsized businesses, which traditionally could not afford the Vision Suite.

Vision started developing Orion in 2001, and it expected to release the software in 2002. However, difficulties in developing the Linux component kept the product in the lab, company officials say, and as a result, the Linux component is much stronger than it would be otherwise. The company originally planned to support Unix with this first release, and AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX support is in the works, but it will have to wait for another day. The nine products that Vision announced last week are as follows:

Orion for OS/400

• Orion Switched Disk for OS/400 lets two or more iSeries servers share a bank of disks, using independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) for data protection. Supports clustering. $7,000.
  
  
• Orion Express for OS/400 is an entry-level data replication solution based on remote journaling. No support for clustering. Limited replication capacity. $7000 to $15,000.
  
  
• Orion Professional for OS/400 is similar to Orion Express but has support for the OS/400 Integrated File System and local journaling, and provides more replication capacity, which is still limited. No support for clustering. $9,000 to $65,000.
  
  
• Orion Enterprise for OS/400 is a continuous availability solution based on Vision Suite that supports complex environments such as those involving MQ Series. Supports clustering. Includes file repair, synch check, and reorg- and upgrade-while-active capabilities. Unlimited replication capacity. $14,000 to $250,000.
  
  
• Orion Advanced Enterprise for OS/400 is based on Orion Enterprise but has support for advanced OS/400 technology, such as advanced (three node) clustering, multiple iASPs, and replicated switched disk. It is "intended for customers who have extreme pain with any down time," Vision solution manager Reier Torgerson says. $17,500 to $312,500.

Note: All Orion for OS/400 products require OS/400 V5R1 or V5R2.

Orion for Windows

• Orion Switched Disk for Windows lets two Windows servers share a bank of Windows SCSI or iSeries disks, for data protection. Based on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and uses Microsoft Cluster Services as the clustering engine. $2,500.
  
  
• Orion Professional for Windows is a high-availability replication solution for Windows environments. Based on NSI Software's GeoCluster Windows cluster-management software (through an OEM agreement Vision has with NSI), to replicate change-based data between two local or remote nodes. $7,000 per server.

Orion for Linux

• Orion Switched Disk for Linux lets two or more Linux servers share a bank of SCSI or iSeries disks for data redundancy. Supports SuSE Version 7.1 and Red Hat Linux Version 8.0. $2,500.

Database Replication

• Orion Integrator provides database replication for DB2/400 V5R1 and later versions, DB2 UDB Version 7.2 and later verions, Oracle 8i and 9i, Sybase ASE Version 12.0 and later versions, and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and later database management systems. Based on Vision's Symbiator product. Starts at $30,000.

Orion Technology

Vision developed these Orion solutions to be distributed applications running simultaneously on many different servers, so it developed the core component, called the Orion Engine, primarily in Java and XML. This engine is composed of various pieces, including the Peer Server, a Cache Server, a Cluster Manager, several operation-system-specific "initiators," and the Navigator Server, which, in turn, communicates with Navigator Client, the Windows-based interface that lets users monitor and control activities on the different servers. (Eventually, Navigator Client will run on any JVM-capable machine. In tests, Vision has actually managed Orion from a Compaq iPaq handheld computer running Linux.)

The operation-system-specific "initiators" inside the Orion Engine connect to the plug-in replicators, which are the main functional components of the product and are also specific to the operating system. These plug-in replicators are called Replication Engine, Active Data, Data Integration, and Hyper Cluster. When Vision already had a product, such as Vision Suite or Symbiator, it reused that code. Much of these "plug-in replicators" are written in C++, to get as close to the hardware as possible to improve performance. The various Orion products that Vision is now offering--and plans to develop in the future--are based on the functionality delivered by these plug-in replicators, but they are not products in themselves (except for Hyper Cluster, which is an optional add-on).

Replication Engine

The Orion Replication Engine for OS/400 has three subcomponents: Environment Replication, Data Replication, and Server Replication. All three of these are available for OS/400; whereas Windows only supports Server Replication. Although Orion supports the replication of Linux files stored on OS/400 servers, it doesn't offer replication for stand-alone Linux environments at this time.

For OS/400 environments, Environment Replication replicates system configuration settings stored in the *SYSBAS library on OS/400, Vision says. The replication of configuration settings in the Replication Engine lets Vision support, among other things, switched disk on OS/400, giving multiple servers access to the same batch of disk. Vision is the only vendor that has a switched disk solution for OS/400 servers, Wegman says. All of the Orion products for OS/400 include Environment Replication.

The Data Replication component for OS/400 provides replication of data via remote journaling. Vision uses this component as the core architecture for its Orion Express and Orion Professional entry-level managed-availability solutions. The Server Replication component is based on the OMS/400 and ODS/400 components of the Vision Suite, and delivers the server-to-server replication, automated failover, clustering, and other features necessary for continuous availability. The Server Replication engine is available with the Orion Enterprise and Orion Advanced Enterprise for OS/400.

Active Data

Next to the Replication Engine sits another component in the "plug-in replicator" layer, called Active Data. This component lets companies do standard maintenance such as reorganize file members, perform synch checks, repair files, or upgrade software, without kicking users off the system. Active Data is available in the Orion Enterprise and Orion Advanced Enterprise for OS/400 products.

Data Integration

The Data Integration component of Orion provides database replication, the same functionality served with Vision's Symbiator product. Users will be able to manage the Data Integration engine, which is based on Symbiator 4.1, through the Orion Navigator client, although the set up still takes place via the Symbiator interface.

Hyper Cluster

The fourth and final replicator that plugs in to the Orion Engine is Hyper Cluster. This optional add-on gives users the tools to define the relationships between groups of dependent OS/400, Windows, and Linux servers. In Vision's Hyper Cluster scheme, you can have regular clusters of OS/400, Windows, or Linux servers, and a Hyper Cluster is a grouping of those clusters. This is the area where Vision is really breaking new ground, allowing users to control their OS/400, Linux, and Windows servers together from a single interface.

The Vision of Orion

Orion is much more than a new release of high availability software for Vision. The company, which has been developing OS/400 high availability software and database replication software since 1990, is betting the farm on this product. Over the next few years, Vision will stop selling its popular Vision Suite of high availability software and its Symbiator data replication solution, because all of that functionality will be included in Orion.

Vision's goal is to establish Orion as the high-level management layer that's capable of seeing everything occurring in the data center. Today, Vision is writing to the APIs of other vendors, but the hope is that other vendors may start writing to Vision's APIs, to plug in to Orion, as the idea of autonomic computing takes hold. Vision, incidentally, is one of only a few iSeries vendors participating in IBM's autonomic computing initiative.

iSeries General Manager Al Zollar says Vision's work is important in helping customers manage their integrated systems. "Today, Orion is the first and only HA solution that supports all the iSeries operating system environments, including OS/400, Linux, and Windows and switched disk," he says.

"Orion is fundamentally different than anything else we've done," Wegman says. "This is the future of the company, and the future is very bright."

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