• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Vision Launches Cloud Initiative for RaaS

    February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Vision Solutions last week unveiled new software and licensing models that should make it easier for public cloud providers to offer Vision’s disaster recovery and high availability solutions to Power and X86 customers. For Power customers, a key element of Vision’s new cloud strategy is metered billing for MIMIX, which Vision says will streamline licensing and billing in a cloud environment, to provide recovery as a service (RaaS).

    Vision is no cloud newbie. In fact, its software has been running for at least a decade in the data centers of managed service providers (MSPs) to provide failover protection for their customers’ critical AS/400, iSeries, and Power Systems applications. Several prominent providers of public IBM i clouds, such as Connectria Hosting, offer Vision’s HA software to cloud customers.

    While Vision understood that its partners were using the HA and DR software, the company didn’t do a whole lot to actively encourage the practice. After all, the profit margins are higher when you’re selling perpetual software licenses to customers who run HA and DR software on their own boxes. While it didn’t stand in the way of cloud adoption, it didn’t change its business model to accommodate it, either.

    Vision’s hesitance about the cloud model has dissolved and now the company is fully embracing the cloud. “We believe that the cloud is the future,” says Doug Piper, Vision’s vice president of product strategy. “We believe HA/DR solution providers that don’t have a cloud offering won’t be able to compete.”

    Cloud-based HA and DR is growing quickly, and Vision wants a piece of the market. According to Gartner, worldwide spending on RaaS is slated to grow to $1.2 billion by 2017, up from $466 million last year, which corresponds to a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent.

    The company has two cloud strategies, one for the open systems DoubleTake products, and one for its IBM i offerings. Both involve making it easier for cloud MSPs to run Vision’s software.

    Vision’s DoubleTake cloud strategy is richer and more complete than its IBM i cloud strategy, owing to the greater sophistication of open systems hypervisors–VMware, Citrix Systems‘ XenServer, and Microsoft‘s HyperV–than IBM‘s PowerVM, which still lacks some capabilities that are found in X86 hypervisors.

    The company announced new DoubleTake offerings that piggyback on Citrix’s Cloud Management Platform, which it obtained with its Cloud.com acquisition. Citrix’s software enables MSPs to automate the licensing, invoicing, and billing aspects of running software in a cloud and offering it as a service. The company also announced an SDK to enable MSPs to integrate DoubleTake into their infrastructures via Vision’s APIs.

    Since there is no all-powerful cloud management system like Citrix Cloud Management Platform for IBM i, Vision is taking another approach to enabling cloud on this platform. To that end, it announced that it has enabled metered billing for MIMIX, which will make it easier for MSPs to manage the licensing, invoicing, and billing aspects, but not fully automate it to the extent that Citrix’s software does.

    Metered billing for MSPs will make it easier for MSPs to offer MIMIX to customers, and represents an important shift in strategy for Vision, Piper says. “Historically, [the MSPs’ relationships with Vision] was based on an on-premise model and a perpetual license,” he says. “There’s a standard set of capabilities that you would expect if you were a business partner providing monthly, pay-as-you-go service to customers. They don’t want to be tied down to a perpetual license. They want … true elasticity.”

    Vision has offered subscription-based licensing for some time, but the model hasn’t been widely adopted by customers. Piper says the new metered billing will work in conjunction with subscription-based licensing to give MSPs more flexibility in how they obtain HA and DR software from Vision, and in turn provide access to the software to customers.

    Piper says the ideal scenario for MSP partners is to obtain the software in a pay-as-you-go manner, and not force them to make big upfront investments for a cloud business that’s just starting to grow. MSPs want to “buy just-in-time, as they need it need it,” Piper says. “This new offering is designed to deliver that kind of flexibility, and make that work seamlessly.”

    Vision has a few other rabbits in its cloud hat, including new releases of MIMIX, codenamed “Viper” and “Carrera.” The Viper release, which is expected later this year, will introduce metered billing to the MIMIX vaulting solution, called RecoverNow.

    Carrera is the next major version of the product, possibly version 8, tentatively scheduled for 2014. In Carrera, Vision hopes to be able to introduce an HA/DR layer that works with a holistic cloud management system, i.e. the Citrix Cloud. But this vision is dependent on IBM adding new capabilities to PowerVM before it can automate HA/DR to that extent, Piper says.

    Vision maintains an R&D lab in Rochester, Minnesota, and it has historically had a very tight relationship with IBM i developers. It is also working closely with IBM on PureSystems, with the obvious goal of enabling HA/DR across all four protected OSes (IBM i, Windows, Linux, and Unix) running on a PureBox.

    Interestingly, iTera Availability wont’ be getting the cloud treatment by Vision, at least not at this time. The company is putting all its cloud eggs into the MIMIX basket. That makes sense when you consider MIMIX is Vision’s enterprise HA offering today, so that’s where it’s going to build the necessary multi-tenant capabilities that MSPs demand.

    RELATED STORIES

    Vision Preps New Release of iTera Availability

    Vision Shares Some 2012 Product Plans

    Vision Shares GUI Across IBM i and AIX HA Products

    Vision Re-Brands HA Portfolio Under ‘Availability’ Moniker

    Vision Merges HA Products Into MIMIX Availability 7

    Vision to Buy Double-Take for $242 Million



                         Post this story to del.icio.us
                   Post this story to Digg
        Post this story to Slashdot

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags:

    Sponsored by
    DRV Tech

    Get More Out of Your IBM i

    With soaring costs, operational data is more critical than ever. IBM shops need faster, easier ways to distribute IBM applications-based data to users more efficiently, no matter where they are.

    The Problem:

    For Users, IBM Data Can Be Difficult to Get To

    IBM Applications generate reports as spooled files, originally designed to be printed. Often those reports are packed together with so much data it makes them difficult to read. Add to that hardcopy is a pain to distribute. User-friendly formats like Excel and PDF are better, offering sorting, searching, and easy portability but getting IBM reports into these formats can be tricky without the right tools.

    The Solution:

    IBM i Reports can easily be converted to easy to read and share formats like Excel and PDF and Delivered by Email

    Converting IBM i, iSeries, and AS400 reports into Excel and PDF is now a lot easier with SpoolFlex software by DRV Tech.  If you or your users are still doing this manually, think how much time is wasted dragging and reformatting to make a report readable. How much time would be saved if they were automatically formatted correctly and delivered to one or multiple recipients.

    SpoolFlex converts spooled files to Excel and PDF, automatically emailing them, and saving copies to network shared folders. SpoolFlex converts complex reports to Excel, removing unwanted headers, splitting large reports out for individual recipients, and delivering to users whether they are at the office or working from home.

    Watch our 2-minute video and see DRV’s powerful SpoolFlex software can solve your file conversion challenges.

    Watch Video

    DRV Tech

    www.drvtech.com

    866.378.3366

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Sponsored Links

    looksoftware:  Free Live Webcast: HTML5 & IBM i - Connect, Discover, Create. March 12 & 13
    United Computer Group, Inc.:  Vault400 for secure online backup and disaster recovery solutions
    Four Hundred Monitor Calendar:  Latest info on national conferences, local events, & Webinars

    More IT Jungle Resources:

    System i PTF Guide: Weekly PTF Updates
    IBM i Events Calendar: National Conferences, Local Events, and Webinars
    Breaking News: News Hot Off The Press
    TPM @ The Reg: More News From ITJ EIC Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Have You Got An Enterprise App For That? Stored Procedure Parameter Defaults And Named Arguments In DB2 For i

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Volume 13, Number 6 -- February 19, 2013
THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY:

looksoftware
CCSS
Townsend Security
HiT Software
Adsero Optima

Table of Contents

  • PowerHA Installs Exceed 2,000 Globally, IBM Says
  • PowerTech Shines a Light on ‘Black Hole’ Commands
  • Vision Launches Cloud Initiative for RaaS
  • Cilasoft Monitors Additional Exit Points with IBM i Security Tool
  • ARCAD Updates IT Service Management Tool
  • Correction: Oracle Does Support Old JDE World on New IBM i
  • CNX Officially a Sencha Partner for Services
  • Help/Systems Opens European Headquarters
  • Boomi Grows Cloud Integration Under Dell
  • Pet Food Distributor Benefits from New IBM i Setup

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Meet The Next Gen Of IBMers Helping To Build IBM i
  • Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All
  • Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?
  • Now, IBM Is Jacking Up Hardware Maintenance Prices
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 24
  • Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices
  • Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools
  • Remain Begins Migrating DevOps Tools To VS Code
  • IBM Readies LTO-10 Tape Drives And Libraries
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 23

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle