by Lisa Guerriero
Preserving and accessing data is essential to businesses of all types. Vision Solutions offers solutions with that in mind—protecting data, minimizing downtime, and maximizing resources for the modern data center.
Established in 1989, Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, CA, and has six additional offices and development labs. It employs nearly 600 people. A privately held company, it does not publicly release its revenue information.
The firm migrates, protects, and recovers databases, systems, and applications to and from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based platform. The software enables different database platforms to share and consolidate data in real-time for proactive, business-critical decision making.
“Our solutions perform near-zero downtime migration of data, applications, and systems to significantly reduce cost, risk, and resource requirements. We utilize real-time replication to prevent data loss and fast recovery to secondary servers in the event of a planned or unplanned failure at the primary site,” explains Becky Hjellming, director, product strategy, Vision Solutions.
The company’s portfolio includes the Double-Take, MIMIX, and solution iTERA product lines. These serve a range of clientele such as enterprises and managed service providers. The firm recently released an update of Double-Take for AIX 5.0.
Take 5.0
Aspects of Double-Take for AIX 5.0 were in development even before version 4.0 was released in 2012. The firm worked on some of the components early to ensure there was enough time to reflect voice-of-the-customer data points in design and development.
“This was especially important for the user experience design since integration and streamlining of high availability clustering into the Vision Solutions Portal’s browser-based interface was the most significant feature of the release,” says Hjellming.
Version 4.0 took Double-Take’s replication and continuous data protection features and integrated them into Vision Solutions Portal. The result was significant ease-of-use improvements for partners and customers. The next step, with version 5.0, was to integrate Double-Take Availability’s high availability clustering features into the Vision Solutions Portal.
Double-Take Availability is the firm’s flagship product for high availability and disaster recovery. It supports replications between all AIX environments, regardless of the combination of hardware, storage, or operating system versions on cloud, physical, or virtual servers. By integrating the product into the Vision Solutions Portal, users benefit from a single-pane view for managing all Double-Take for AIX products.
“This significant enhancement adds to the ease of management for Double-Take Availability, as well as the full product suite, as all products can now be monitored and managed in the browser-based Vision Solutions Portal. Ease of use also contributes considerably to the ability to meet recovery time and recovery point service level agreements,” notes Hjellming.
The company’s Double-Take Move product enables AIX migrations both on premise and in the cloud, limiting downtime and reducing risks and disruptions. Version 5.0 aims to further reduce migration time, adding the ability to go from zero to full virtual role-swap testing without downtime. The feature, which was heavily requested by customers, provides value for high availability and disaster recovery implementations. As a result of the feature, the only downtime is the minutes required to cutover.
Released this Spring, version 5.0 also adds support for a handful of AIX system administration and monitoring utilities, which were only partly supported in prior releases. Vision Solutions made the new version available to select customers prior to the public launch, allowing it to gather feedback on installation and operation in clients’ production environments.
Double-Take for AIX 5.0 is installed on critical systems used for enterprise resource planning, content resource management, and other key business functions. Customers implement it for legacy databases as well as newer systems.
Businesses of all types and sizes use the product, from small firms to Fortune 500 corporations. It is particularly beneficial when data protection is mandated by aggressive service level agreements (SLAs). This includes SLAs that stem from participation in a controlled supply chain or from regulatory guidelines, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health.
“The companies that find the most value with Double-Take for AIX tend to be companies where the business places stringent SLAs on IT, requiring continuous access to production servers as well as protection from a full spectrum of disasters—ranging from accidentally lost database records, to accidental or malicious database corruptions, to server and datacenter meltdowns,” observes Hjellming.
Interface for Improvement
The updated Double-Take for AIX, version 5.0, reduces downtime for migrations. It provides a comprehensive, browser-based interface for all Double-Take for AIX and MIMIX products. Unifying under the Vision Solutions Portal improves ease of use, not just for clients’ convenience but to improve the ability to meet recovery time and recovery point SLAs.
“The easy-to-use, single-pane-of-glass Vision Solutions Portal interface provides a comfortable graphical experience for configuration, monitoring, and control. Automated procedures embedded in Vision Solutions Portal ensure that best practices are used for common procedures such as failover,” says Hjellming. SW
