Trader’s Gets Serious About North American HA Market

May 18, 2010 Alex Woodie

Trader’s, the French developers of the Quick-EDD/HA high availability software for i/OS servers, has signed iSam Blue of Utah as a master distributor for the North American market, the two companies announced at the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida. The partners also unveiled version 10 of the Quick-EDD/HA software, which introduces a new GUI, among other enhancements.

Trader’s has been trying to break into the North American market for i/OS high availability market for several years, with limited success. While the vendor says 150 of its total installed base of 1,000 customers are based in North America (the rest being mainly in Europe), the Trader’s CEO Thierry Roux says it was a “mistake” to try to “do it ourselves.”

So the vendor signed an agreement with iSam Blue to be its representative and drive business on this continent. iSam Blue, which is based in Mapleton, Utah, is charged with building a reseller channel for the Quick-EDD/HA product. Representatives with both companies were in Orlando recently for the annual COMMON conference, and reported that they made some progress in building the channel, which currently has 10 resellers.

iSam Blue is a new company that was formed to represent Trader’s in most of the Western Hemisphere. While the company is new, it’s no newbie to the i/OS high availability arena, as Robert Seal, the CEO of iSam Blue, was at iTera during the early days of its attempt to break into the i/OS high availability software field. iTera found success with its product, called Echo2, and was eventually acquired by Vision Solutions in 2006. iTera was based in Salt Lake City, Utah; Vision still maintains an office there.

Trader’s and iSam Blue are betting that the combination of affordable and transparent pricing (two P10 licenses cost about $30,000) and local technical support will help give it a share of the large and prestigious North American software market. The partners are also hoping that features added to Quick-EDD/HA with version 10 will attract new customers.

A new GUI console in version 10 will allow administrators to monitor HA replication processes and manage certain aspects of the product from the comfort of a drag-and-drop graphical interface. Previously, the product only offered a 5250 green-screen interface. Users will still be able to use the green screen.

Trader’s also added continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities with this release. With CDP, customers will be able to restore data or objects to a particular point in time, which will be particularly beneficial when data is inadvertently deleted or otherwise damaged. With traditional HA, user errors are replicated across systems, making it nearly worthless for recovering from mistakes.

Version 10 also gains a new “map drop mode” function that will allow users to perform real-time data transformations between two System i servers. The map drop function will be particularly useful for maintaining customer database structures in the proper format during application upgrades, data warehousing projects, and other instances where large amounts of data need to be moved. Instead of taking hours or days to move the data and perform the necessary transformations, the new map drop mode will enable the processes to be complete in a matter of minutes, the vendor says.

Quick-EDD/HA is built on a proprietary i/OS journal-scrape technology, as opposed to remote journaling. Company officials maintain their approach is superior in several respects, including lower CPU consumption, lower bandwidth consumption, faster failovers, and an overall simpler design.

While most of the big HA vendors adopted IBM’s remote journaling technology as the basis for their HA replication products, Trader’s sees no advantage to handing that sort of control over to IBM technology.