Idera Grows with Product Offerings, SQL Server Adoption
In the six months since the release of its SQL compliance manager, Idera (http://www.idera.com) has enjoyed increasing market and customer momentum."We couldn't be happier with the rapid rate of adoption of our products," says Idera President and CEO Rick Pleczko. SQL compliance manager has added to that momentum by providing SQL Server professionals with a realtime auditing solution that helps them meet requirements for such audit standards as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, HIPAA, BASEL II, and the USA Patriot Act.
The product was a fitting complement to the company's SQL Server management offerings, which include SQL diagnostic manager, a realtime performance monitoring and diagnostic package; SQLsafe, an Enterprise-scale backup and recovery solution; SQLschedule, a job-management tool; and SQLconfig, a change-and configuration-management solution.
Plezcko acknowledges that the company's growth has been fueled by the increasing deployment of SQL Server in the enterprise and by the rapid adoption of recent new product releases. Idera recently announced full support for SQL Server 2005 across its entire product line.
—Dawn Cyr
Split Servers from Stratus
A few of our editors recently chatted with Denny Lane, director of product marketing for Stratus Technologies (http://www.stratus.com), about some of his company's latest hardware offerings, as well as a promising piece of software called Active Upgrade. We were impressed with Stratus's currently available ftServer W Series 4300 system, an affordable 1-way or 2-way SMP fault-tolerant server for Windows Server 2003 environments.The server offers a two-CPU design, forming a continuously available, fully redundant server with better than 99.999 percent uptime performance. "There's no such thing as failover," Lane said. "It's like two simultaneous systems."The new server uses Active Upgrade software, which permits fast online system and software updates, as well as hot-fix OS patches. The Active Upgrade process splits one logical server into two independently running physical servers. While one physical server runs the application, the other is updated with new software.The two sides then remerge, resynchronize, and return to fault-tolerant, lock-step operation. Active Upgrade will be available in the first quarter of 2006.
—Jason Bovberg
Revivio Bolsters Its Case for CDP Appliances
"The industry is waking up to the importance of data protection," says Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Revivio (http://www.revivio.com), a vendor of continuous data protection (CDP) appliances. Wadsworth recently chatted with me about two new Revivio offerings from products that strengthen the case for using a CDP appliance to back up and restore crucial data.
The first offering, the CPS 1200 Replication Module, is an add-on for the Revivio Continuous Protection System (CPS) 1200 appliance. The module allows multiple CPS 1200s to be connected over WAN links, potentially spanning thousands of miles. Asynchronous replication over a WAN keeps data safe at remote locations, but backup and restore occurs without slowing network or system performance, Wadsworth says.
Revivio's second announcement, the CPS 1200i, is a CDP appliance that's tailored to the data-protection needs and budgets of individual departments and small businesses and is priced below $15,000. "It's an outgrowth of customer requests for a lower-cost departmental solution," says Wadsworth.
—Anne Grubb
Identify's AppSight Black Box Speeds Development Lifecycle
Problem resolution across the application development lifecycle is an arduous task. Attempts to collect data and re-create a problem often result in a lengthy, costly iterative process. Lori Wizdo, vice president of marketing at Identify (http://www.identify.com), says that "75 to 85 percent of the resolution cycle is spent finding the cause, and the rest of the time is spent fixing the problem."
Identify's AppSight 6.0 includes a software module, AppSight Black Box, which automates the process of problem resolution. The module operates like an aircraft's black-box flight recorder, recording application execution and capturing a realtime log of user actions, configuration data and code execution. Developers save a lot of time when they don't have to try to re-create the problem. Visual Studio 2005 users can now access this black-box functionality because AppSight 6.0 beta is available through an embedded UI in Visual Studio 2005.
—Trisha Pendley