Vision Solutions, Arrow Electronics Push HA to Entry AIX Shops

Published: May 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software maker Vision Solutions and server distributor Arrow Electronics have teamed up to push a bundled hardware-software high availability offering to their combined channel partners who are trying to get small and medium businesses using AIX to cluster their machines.

While big Unix shops have been using high availability software for many years as a matter of necessity, smaller businesses have been relatively slow on the uptake for HA software over the years because HA software was expensive and so was the redundant hardware to support it. But thanks to Moore's Law, processing capacity and storage is relatively cheap now, and competition in the HA software space has driven down software pricing, too. Which means HA solutions are now affordable for SMB shops. Getting that message to customers is not an easy task, since SMB organizations tend to work through channel partners, not the IT vendors themselves.

That's one of the reasons why Vision Solutions, which provides an alternative to IBM's HACMP clustering software for AIX and which also now owns the company that many years ago created much of the code behind HACMP, has partnered with Arrow, which is one of the two master distributors of IBM servers worldwide to get HA software into SMB shops. The bundled offering that the two companies have cooked up for SMBs includes IBM's new Power 520 entry and Power 550 midrange Power6-based servers using either 3.5 GHz or 4.2 GHz processors and running AIX 5.3 or AIX 6.1, to which is added Vision Solutions EchoStream for AIX data replication and system clustering software.

According to Bob Johnson, senior vice president of sales for the Americas and EMEA at Vision Solutions, Lakeview Technology (which was acquired by Vision Solutions last year) started working on what eventually became EchoStream for AIX almost two years ago when IBM canceled the licensing deal for its HACMP software. The initial starting point for the data replication software in EchoStream for AIX came from the acquisition of a company called Mendocino Software, while a bit of the clustering portion is based on the code base from HA Technical Solutions. (The HACMP code base came from yet another company called Availant, which Lakeview bought in late 2003.) But Johnson wants to be clear that the EchoStream product is really a whole new animal, and was developed in the Waltham, Massachusetts, software lab that is an offshoot of the original Availant team, which was founded by some ex-IBMers in 1990 and picked by IBM to create HACMP in the first place.

The partnership between Arrow and Vision Solutions goes beyond just bundling up wares, preconfiguring them at the factory with AIX and EchoStream, and giving resellers some margin incentive to push it. As one of the largest peddlers of AIX iron in the world, Arrow has a vast AIX customer database, which expands the reach that Vision Solutions can have with its own channel. For now, the deal is only for customers in the United States, and will be expanded to Canada next. For now, that is what Johnson says Vision Solutions is focused on, but he concedes that the AIX market is pretty large overseas as well.

Johnson also says that the company has no plans to expand into the HP-UX or Solaris Unix bases at this time. "Right now, we are focused on AIX and IBM is our strategic platform partner," says Johnson. "Most of our partners who sell i platform products also sell a lot of AIX gear, too, so this makes sense. Once we get the Power Systems market figured out, we'll address the other Unixes."

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