iTera Offers Big Discounts on Echo2 Software for New CBUs

Published: October 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software maker iTera has extended the discounts it is giving to customers who buy IBM's Capacity BackUp editions of the System i5 line to the new machines the company launched two weeks ago.

Back in July and August of this year, IBM extended the Capacity BackUp editions with a new i5 550 machine and added some i5 570 and i5 595 models, and also started to allow companies to use CBU machines for real work, not to just sit there idly waiting for a disaster to happen. This last change, which came in August, was met with a 50 percent discount by Itera on its Echo2 high availability software for OS/400 and i5/OS, including its entry-level Echo2 product as well as the enterprise edition, if it is bought in conjunction with a CBU box.

iTera came into the iSeries high availability software market by storm five years ago, putting price and feature pressure on all of the established players in this market. It's competitors reacted with their own pricing actions and a broadening of their product lines. This is how competition is supposed to work. To keep the heat on, iTera started a promotion back in August that gave CBU buyers a 50 percent discount off its Echo2 HA software.

Still, the executives running iTera, like many of us, have always believed that IBM needed to do more to make HA clustering more appealing to the majority of AS/400 and iSeries customers. Most OS/400 and i5/OS shops use relatively modest machines and have even more modest budgets. The i5 520 CBU line is the result of the pressure that the i5/OS and OS/400 community brought to bear. And iTera is clearly going to try to take advantage of that.

"Our Echo2 HA and Echo2 Vault solutions perfectly complement IBM's CBU Editions in building resiliency within any size business," explains Dan NeVille, president and chief executive officer at iTera. "And with the announcement of the System i 520 CBU Edition, System i (formerly iSeries) shops of all sizes can capitalize on and enjoy unprecedented data protection."

With the i5 CBU Editions, IBM's intent is to get customers a hot-swap box that is from 30 to 50 percent less costly than a production i5 machine. This CBU machine runs HA clustering software and sits in standby, waiting for a disaster to strike so it can leap into action.

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