The Four Hundred--Lakeview Gains New HA Software with HATS Acquisition

Lakeview Technology filled a gap in its line of high availability software last week, when it acquired the assets of H.A. Technical Solutions, a Golden Valley, Minnesota, developer of high availability software for Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms. Lakeview says the deal, which includes all of HATS's products, customers, and OEM partnerships, will benefit its OS/400 customer base by letting them manage cross-platform high-availability operations from within its MIMIX product line.

Lakeview, like most other high-availability software vendors in the OS/400 space these days, has been working to develop cross-platform high-availability offerings, or at least new offerings that support non-OS/400 platforms. Lakeview's cross-platform offering, MIMIX for Windows, provides application replication for xSeries servers running under the wings of an iSeries server.

The acquisition of HATS should go far in extending Lakeview's platform coverage beyond OS/400 and OS/400-controlled Windows environments. "This strategic acquisition fills in important parts of our MIMIX division product roadmap for delivering high-availability, disaster-recovery, and clustering solutions across operating environments," says Bill Merchantz, Lakeview's chief executive and president.

In addition to HATS's international sales channel and customers, Lakeview gains the HATS technology and product line, which includes H.A. Clusters, a switched disk-based high-availability offering for Linux and Unix operating systems; H.A. EchoStream, file replication software for Linux, Unix, and Windows; EchoStream2 for relational databases replication; and H.A. Fulcrum, a new load-balancing application for clusters, which the company intended to introduce this year.

While the HATS and MIMIX products and development efforts will remain separate, Lakeview does plan some degree of integration between the product lines, says Glen VanBenschoten, vice president of product strategy for Lakeview.

"The likely place for integration is the GUI level, the management and control layer," VanBenschoten says. "Server-level switching--what you probably know as roll-swapping--has to be synchronized. That's the obvious point of integration. That's the natural tie-in point, at the user interface."

Lakeview recently started shipping a new release of its MIMIX Browser management tool called the Availability Co-Pilot, which gives MIMIX users greater insight into the state of the MIMIX replication process (see "Lakeview's New 'Co-pilot' Keeps an Eye on Switchover Readiness"). Lakeview's plans call for adding more functionality to the Availability Co-Pilot to make roll-swaps easier in the future. Now, with the HATS acquisition, the MIMIX Browser is slated to be the control point for MIMIX and HATS replication processes.

If that strategy sounds similar to what Lakeview's competitor Vision Solutions is doing with its new Orion product--which prominently features a new GUI that brings together replication, clustering, and switched-disk offerings for OS/400 and Windows and, soon, Linux and Unix--that's because it is, VanBenschoten says. "It's no secret: We try to serve the same set of customers," he says. "We're trying to serve the same customer needs."

VanBenschoten characterized the HATS acquisition primarily as a technology acquisition to further support its iSeries customers. MIMIX users, like many OS/400 shops, are multiplatform shops that are struggling with finding a way to manage their OS/400, Windows, Unix, and Linux high-availability processes--preferably from a single vendor and preferably with OS/400 at the controls. In particular, MIMIX customers have been asking how Lakeview intends to support AIX when IBM adds direct support for its Unix operating system to the iSeries, which is expected in 2004. It's these kinds of questions that fueled the HATS acquisition, VanBenschoten says.

Lakeview considered building a product that could support other platforms, but decided to buy instead. "We've been looking to fill a gap" in our product line, VanBenschoten says. "To fill that need, we acquired HATS, which helps us to leapfrog ahead with products that are already established."

For HATS, the acquisition brings a bigger distribution network for its products, says Leroy Earl, HATS vice president of marketing and sales, who is now part of VanBenschoten's team in Rochester, Minnesota. "The HATS reseller channel was nowhere near as large as Lakeview's," Earl says. "That's one of the things that make the acquisition exciting. They bring us many more resellers. We had concentrated on direct sales to OEM customers."

HATS was started in 1994, when Mercury Data Systems founded a high availability division to fill a contract with the Taiwan Air Force, to build a high availability cluster solution after its research showed that no existing solution met the Taiwanese government's requirements. The division finished developing the application in 1995, and it went on to be installed in every steel mill in China and in numerous brokerage firms and banks in Taiwan, HATS says. Later that year, King Capital, a $350 million private company from Minneapolis, bought the high availability division, and HATS was formed.

Many of HATS OEM customers are in the telecommunications business, running the HATS software on hardwired high availability boxes. Its first customer in the United States was Motorola, which used HATS clustering software to deliver high availability for its two-way paging systems. Motorola chose HATS, the software company says, "because it was the only product that could deliver a worst-case failover and restore operation in four seconds or less." Other telecom companies choosing HATS include France Telecom eBusiness, an ISP; Ericsson Messaging, a cellular phone operator; and Samsung, which used HATS technology for its G3 base stations.

In early 2002, HATS announced that it had brought its clustering technology to the iSeries Linux arena, becoming the first vendor to support that space, with an IBM ServerProven solution. Other platforms supported by HATS include Sun Microsystems' Sun OS and Solaris; Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX; Silicon Graphics's Irix; Linux, on all platforms; Free BSD Unix; The SCO Group's OpenServer and UnixWare; VxWorks; Apple's Mac OS X Server; and IBM's AIX.

Lakeview did not disclose terms of the acquisition. Other companies outside the OS/400 space had bid for HATS as well, Earl says. Lakeview obtained all of HATS's assets in the deal except for the right to the HATS name. A Lakeview spokeswoman says that all HATS employees are being brought over to Lakeview. The former company's headquarters in Golden Valley were closed on Friday and moved to Lakeview's offices in Chicago.