NetApp offers SnapMirror, a data replication option.
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OpenText Availability
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Carbonite acquired Double-Take, a data replication and disaster recovery option, in early 2017. The technology now powers OpenText Availability, the high availability and data replication product.
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SharePlex
Score 10.0 out of 10
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SharePlex from Quest Software is a data replication software offering near real-time replication and supporting a wide variety of databases.
NetApp SnapMirror is a no-brainer when it comes to retaining an offsite backup for disaster recovery purposes. The backbone of the product is the Snapshot technology built into NetApp technology. In my experience, the Snapshot/SnapMirror software has been flawless and very dependable. The only piece that I can see adding in the future is potentially connecting SnapMirror to the cloud as an additional backup destination.
I believe it would work well with continuous replication in a DR scenario with no time limits and having the ability to fail back is a bonus, but in a one off move the decision to restrict the time it can sync for has proven to be an issue for us.
SharePlex really shines when set alongside GoldenGate. The licensing costs of the two products would appear to place them in entirely different ballparks yet they perform nearly identically in practice. SharePlex is suitable for heterogenous replication of one database to another. The list of targets is ever increasing, with support for all major RDBMS vendors as well as support for popular NoSQL and JSON replication. SharePlex is effective when replicating from on-premise to cloud. Whether that's migrating data, creating a high-availability presence in a public or private cloud, or populating a data mart, it does the job quite well.
A product is worthless in my opinion if you don't have a great support team to work with. I've had issues with replication jobs that were resolved quickly and easily by the support team.
DR - Doubletake is the only tool that I'm aware of that can handle DR replication of both physical and virtual environments. There sre others, but they use a snapshot technology, where doubletake has continuous replication of data.
Move - we have moved physical and virtual environments from around the world without ever having to leave the office. One of the companies we migrated started off with their equipment in Switzerland, and after the servers were in a fully protected state in the US, that failover to the new location took 45 min.
When first introduced the Change Data Capture process was awkward. Each subsequent release has improved the process.
Sometimes the Shareplex monitoring service in Foglight gets overly aggressive in sending out error notifications and can end up spamming the admins with email alerts for one problem. We have had to tone that down.
Very well versed and a good product to deal with downtime to recover from the failure is pretty good. Also, NetApp's engagement on Incident calls is very professional and humble. I would give a 100% rating to this product as I have been working on this for the past 5 years. It is stable, fast and highly reliable
It just works 99% of the time. Even if there's a network outage, jobs just pick up after the outage is over. The only reason it's not a 10 is the weakness of the GUI interface for configuration. For me, all configuration has to be done at the command line.
Cabonite Availability is a very practical and useful tool that can help any business weather any type of IT disaster. The ease and quickness of restoring data helps us provide as seamless an experience as possible. Many times our customers will never know there was an outage. This brings confidence in our brand and improves our organization's standing and reputation.
NetApp support has always been great. With the NetApp Auto-support system/web portal, the visibility into your NetApp storage is incredible. There have been times when I've been contacted by them for an issue that I haven't even discovered yet. For example, I received a call 20 minutes after a drive failed in our filer. I hadn't checked my email at that time and therefore didn't see the alert.
Once through to support it is very good and they have assisted us through a number of issues. I don't always think that they provide a solution, more a workaround, but in a move situation where each copy is moving once, that isn't an issue. I'd be more concerned if we were using it to manage a DR scenario.
Support is very responsive. They take ownership of the problems and see them through to the finish. When a bug is found they work towards developing testing and making the fix available to us to solve the problem.
We chose NetApp's SnapMirror solution primarily because it was already integrated and licensed on our storage platforms. This allowed us to have a very fast implementation time and really allowed us to quickly close the learning gap of our administrators. Not only is NetApp SnapMirror easy to use, but it is also really easy to set up. IBM's product seemed quite difficult to set up and it would have taken our team much more time (which we don't have) to learn that product than NetApp's SnapMirror.
It is better for critical apps than Veeam due to the lower RPO. Veeam is favoured by some customers due to it's attractive price point. Zerto is a very strong product and is innovating continuously. I don't see so much of this from DoubleTake.
SharePlex support is an award-winning team, which is available for 24 hours, and any time they have solutions with perfect expertise. Besides, SharePlex has supported data migration, with multiple reporting features that ensure there are comprehensive database evaluations. The simplicity of SharePlex installation also gives it a higher mark, is very efficient, and allows companies to understand it easily.
