Vision Solutions Bolsters Network, HA Capabilities

by Dan Burger

For many companies, successful high availability and data replication projects depend on near real-time transfer of business-critical and time-sensitive data. And for implementations that rely on communication lines to remote locations, wide area network (WAN) links can be the bottleneck where the data replication traffic clogs the pipe. Dealing with problems relating to overloaded WANs led to the partnership of iSeries high availability vendor Vision Solutions and Peribit Networks, a company that specializes in boosting WAN performance.

By partnering with Peribit and reselling its equipment, Vision hopes to eliminate the WAN as an obstacle to the performance of remote data replication. One of the biggest issues faced by organizations setting up true high availability data replication is the degree of synchronization between the remote site and the data center. The closer the synchronization, the more perfect the disaster recovery.

To get a grip on this, Peribit builds a device that compresses and accelerates the data flow in networks. These two core performance elements relate to the bandwidth needed for applications to run and the performance of the application itself in order to reduce latency during replication. Any application running over any network are very sensitive to the latency of the links that hook distributed applications together, and high availability clustering and data replication software is similarly sensitive to latency. Benchmark testing completed by both Vision and Peribit with joint customers using Peribit's WAN gear show an improvement of 7 to 20 times in compression and reduction in bandwidth traffic, resulting in an increase in throughput capacity of three to four times. The testing took place over the course of six months and involved multiple environments.

Peribit makes a series of products that are deployed on each end of a WAN link. If that link is connecting data centers to a disaster recovery site, Peribit provides a series of integrated functions that increase the bandwidth on the link by compressing data and accelerating data transfer by enhancing the performance of the TCP/IP networking protocol over that WAN. Peribit products also allow the management of bandwidth. The management feature allows users to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to data replication while also providing the visibility and control of how other business applications are running to the remote sites. In most cases, this will be a cost-effective alternative to increasing bandwidth and a performance upgrade that results in application efficiencies. In the agreement between Vision and Peribit, Vision will market and sell Peribit products both directly and through its global partner network.

"We are seeing the need for making more options available to companies that are implementing high availability and data replication," says Allan Arnold, president of Vision Solutions. "High performance is an option we can provide through the Peribit partnership because compression helps optimize the high availability environment."

Vision and its sales channel gain a technology that offers the twin benefits of increased data throughput and transmission speed. "Vision's larger accounts have network groups within the IT departments and their job is to optimize the network," Arnold notes. "Peribit is a proven player in the network space."

What Peribit gets out of the deal, Arnold says, is access to approximately 2,000 Vision Solutions customers around the world. That customer base includes primarily AS/400 and iSeries shops, which have been the focus of Vision's business. But the iSeries is a new market segment for Peribit. Company sources estimate that 15 to 20 percent of existing Peribit customers have an iSeries in their multi-platform environments.

Peribit has similar partnership relationships with Veritas, Network Appliance, and EMC. However, these are companies noted for storage and backup. The replication of data for high availability on the iSeries is slightly different, but the technology applied to enhancing WAN performance is the same.

The announcement of this partnership comes at the time Vision is completing its acquisition of OS Solutions, which also adds network optimization products to the Vision portfolio. The OS Solutions software suite includes a product that cleans OS/400 servers of unnecessary and unused objects and other files that build up over time. That product generates a report noting files that can be compressed to free up disk space and improve performance. It also has the capability to monitor the system and fix the problems it finds and points out on the report.

A second network optimization tool that Vision has though its acquisition of OS Solutions analyzes the databases on an OS/400 server and identifies items that haven't been used for a pre-selected period of time--6 months, 12 months, two years, or whatever. Those items can then be removed from the production database and archived to another location with all the links that are needed to retrieve it. The net result is a smaller database that is more quickly replicated.

Vision's vice president of marketing, David Wegman, explained it in these terms. "The fundamentals around HA are replication. If you have a lot of garbage on your machine, you are replicating that garbage. So if a company can reclaim 20 percent of its system just by cleaning the junk out of it, it will get a cleaner environment. As a result, that company is likely to have a faster replication and a cleaner, faster switch time."

The third product in the OS Solutions suite is a high availability solution based on remote journaling. It is expected to give Vision a stronger play with in small and medium businesses as well as bringing another option to larger enterprises that are looking to reduce the complexity of their high availability implementations.

Vision's partners are getting technical briefings on the products from Peribit and OS Solutions at a Vision partner summit that began last Monday (April 4). Wegman said the Vision partner channel would be up to speed on these products within a month.