Vision Touts Cloud Readiness of MIMIX DR
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
|
MIMIX DR is ready to start protecting IBM i customers from the cloud. That’s the message coming from Vision Solutions, which is ramping up its marketing machine in the hopes of sparking cloud sales of the remote journaling-based disaster recovery (DR) solution for itself, and its managed service provider (MSP) partners, too. MIMIX DR is a new piece of DR software that Vision unveiled in May. The software is nearly identical to the full MIMIX product that has been synonymous with high availability since the days of the AS/400, except for the lack of an automated failover process and some high-end auditing functions. When the company launched MIMIX DR, Vision was clearly angling to position the product as suitable for use either on-premise or in the cloud. The key thing to keep in mind here is that MIMIX DR software requires a secondary IBM i server to be connected to the primary, since it uses IBM‘s remote journaling (RJ) technology. The use of remote journaling, by the way, gives MIMIX DR an identical–and very low–recovery point objective [RPO] as the full MIMIX HA product. Put simply, MIMIX DR is not going to miss many transactions during a disaster, if any, although recovering the system is up to you. This recovery becomes easier for customers when they buy MIMIX DR as a service from an MSP. For starters, it eliminates the need to buy a secondary IBM i server to house the replicated data. Instead, it can sit on one big server at the MSP data center that’s used to protect multiple customers. When one of those customers has a problem, the MSP is ready to spin up a recovery partition–or move the partition to a whole new machine. This approach makes a lot of sense for Vision, which a year ago didn’t have a cohesive cloud strategy and was relying on MSP partners to make its MIMIX HA and iTera HA products available as a service. Vision’s other offering, MIMIX RecoverNow, uses a snap-shot approach that, while it eliminates the requirement to have an IBM i server on hand to replicate to, doesn’t offer the same RPO as the RJ-based products. Vision had one MSP signed up to offer MIMIX DR as a service in the cloud when it launched the software five months ago: Baseline Data Services. The Indiana company’s director of technical services, Bob Morici, talked about how he was looking forward to helping IBM i customers augment their regular tape backups and “eliminate the potential catastrophe of losing several hours worth of transactions.” Now, Vision has signed up two additional IBM i MSPs to carry MIMIX DR, including ServIT of Kennesaw, Georgia, and iTech Solutions Group of Danbury, Connecticut. MIMIX DR will give smaller businesses what they want in terms of DR, which is the same level of DR as larger companies have, says Harold Raeford, director of solution sales for ServIT. “The smallest company can have a global reach in today’s marketplace, and they don’t want the exposure of lost orders or the inability to deliver on a customer request because they know how easy it is to find a competitor online,” Raeford says in a press release. “MIMIX DR allows us to provide our customers enterprise-level data protection without having to worry about buying equipment, updating software or managing licenses.” iTech Solutions president Pete Massiello hails MIMIX DR’s ease of use. “MIMIX DR gives us the ability to offer an affordable, full DR solution to even our smallest customers, so they can operate their businesses knowing their data is protected. It’s all about peace of mind,” Massiello says in the press release. It will be interesting to see how Vision evolves its cloud offerings with MIMIX DR, which costs about half what the full MIMIX HA solution costs. Interestingly, both iTech Solutions and ServIT continue to offer EVault‘s online backup and recovery solutions for IBM i customers. EVault has done quite well in the IBM i space, and has many MSP partners using its product, either as a white label/OEM setup, where the MSP serves as the data center host, or by shunting IBM i backups off to EVault’s data center. RELATED STORY Vision Unveils New Entry-Level DR Solution for IBM i
|
