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| IT Jungle - Four Hundred Stuff |
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Celadon Signs with SafeData for HA Hot Site Services
by Alex Woodie |
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| Celadon Trucking Service, a provider of long-haul transportation services across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, has signed a contract with SafeData to provide high
availability and disaster recovery services for its iSeries computing environment, SafeData announced yesterday. In the event of a disaster or major server outage, Celedon's outage
would be cut from 24 to 36 hours down to about two hours with SafeData. |
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| SafeData launched its unique blend of high availability mirroring and hot-site disaster recovery services last year (see SafeData Launches Hosting Service for HA and DR").
Under the company's SafeData/HA offering, a customer implements one of the high availability mirroring solutions--it supports iTera's Echo2
and Lakeview Technology's MIMIX ha1--and then replicates data from their primary iSeries machine to SafeData's iSeries machine, located at its data center, thereby preventing the customer from
needing to purchase a second iSeries machine. |
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| Michael Gabbei, the Celadon CIO, said the company's previous hot-site arrangement was not up to par. "We evaluated many solutions and it was SafeData's top-notch disaster recovery facility in Medford, Massachusetts and its strong knowledge of both business and technology,
especially in the iSeries and iTera solutions, that made SafeData/HA far outweigh our other options," he says. |
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| Lakeview is trusting that many of its partners will find that same pent-up demand among SMBs in other industries. High availability, of course, is widely used by larger businesses with the money to buy redundant systems.
"But there's the whole SMB market out there that doesn't have those resources," says Ed Vesely, Lakeview's V.P. of worldwide marketing. "So by offering a vaulting service, our partners are able to really expand their reach to
a whole new customer base. ... These SMB customers could implement a high-availability or disaster-recovery solution to the offsite vault, without having all that infrastructure in place. They don't have to have extra people.
It's really something that helps them expand their portfolio." |
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| Celadon Trucking Service is a subsidiary of the Celadon Group, a $430-million company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. |
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| Lakeview, however, says that its MIMIX Vault is different because it will encompass so many partners from so many different industries, such as AgVantage and Avnet, who will offer the vaulting service to
complement their regular software and services. "We looked at some of the current trends in the marketplace, one of them being the uptake in SMB purchasing," Vesely says. "This plays directly into that market,
and our partner network allows us to capture a portion of that market very quickly." |
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| In AgVantage's case, the ISV bought an i5 520 that runs the vault in a remote location. One third of the machine is dedicated to its software customers, who have MIMIX solutions installed on their own iSeries
and backup their operations to the 520. A second third backs up data for customers of AgVantage's application service provider (ASP) business, and the remaining third serves as a recovery system that customers can
work from in case of a disaster. |
| MIMIX Vault services support i5/OS, AIX, Windows, and Linux and can be custom-fit to the customers' needs using MIMIX HA1 or DR1. "We're not a one-trick pony," Vesely says. In addition to supplying the software
used by its partners, Lakeview gives guidelines to its partners outlining how the service should work, it helps to pitch the idea to the partners' customers, and it helps partners to draft disaster-recovery plans for
their customers. |
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