Paul Holenstein
Executive Vice President
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the Spring 2009 edition of the Gravic Shadowbase Newsletter, our semi-annual news update from the Shadowbase Products Group.
Busy and exciting (and scary) characterizes the six months since our last update with a world financial credit and stock market meltdown, landmark US presidential election, and an absolutely bone-jarring economic tsunami sweeping over the land. Yet through it all, we are delighted to report that although our belts are tighter and our forecasts are a bit leaner, we still see terrific opportunity in the markets we serve and the customer discussions we have. We are pleased to report in this letter about a number of new Shadowbase solutions deploying, new products debuting, and new customers selecting Shadowbase as their solution of choice. Please visit Dick Davis’ Sales newsletter section for a short review of some of our exciting activities in sales.
We are now in full swing celebrating Gravic's 30th anniversary. Our company was built by great employees, customers, and products and has truly lasted the test of time. We thank you for your trust in us over all these years. For more information about our 30 years, including milestones and some interesting highlights, click here.
For new and upcoming product features, we are busy building efficient synchronous replication solutions. We met recently with various interested customers and potential customers so that we could fully understand your needs in this area. If you have a keen interest in this technology and the availability boosts that come from synchronous replication (e.g., zero data loss at failures as well as avoiding data collisions for active/active environments), please talk with us soon so that we can be sure to address your interests. Although we do not currently have a synchronous replication product available, we are working feverishly to meet your needs in this area, and by the time you read this, HP should have released some enabling TMF technology that assists us in our efforts.
Another area that we are aggressively pursuing is seamless replication of Base24™ data. We are pleased to report that we have entered this market, and look forward to working with many of you who have been looking for solutions to run your environments in both active/almost active as well as active/active architectures. Please visit our Product Management and Development Update for more information about this and other exciting developments for Shadowbase data replication solutions.
Gravic Labs, our internal intellectual property (IP) research and development arm, actively explores our future technology directions, and is proud to announce that we recently obtained another US patent issue: #7,523,110, entitled High Availability Designated Winner Data Replication. This IP is utilized in the Shadowbase HADW product currently used by our telecommunications clients and their licensees; however, this approach is applicable to any multi-node active/active system where data collisions are possible. Basically, the technology provides a method for automatically identifying and resolving data collisions that may occur when running in an active/active update-anywhere architecture.
For those of you that are blog enthusiasts, we recently launched our Shadowbase blog to keep you abreast of our efforts in a variety of areas. The blog is co-authored by a number of key Shadowbase executives, each with his own personality and key insights into the data replication space and life in general. Our goal is to keep the content fresh, with regular postings, and yet provide important tidbits of business and technical insights about our markets and technology all (hopefully) told with at least some level of wit. Please take it for a spin and let us know what you think by clicking here.
We enjoyed seeing many of you over the past several months. I was particularly happy to visit the South African Tandem User Group (SATUG) show in March. I gave a presentation on the recent advances in data replication technologies, and also taught a half-day education track on how this exciting technology is permeating our everyday lives in ways we don’t even notice. Please let us know if you are interested in either presentation. If you have never been to the show, the SATUG board is a wonderful host, blessed with a beautiful country that is rapidly growing. And, we look forward to seeing many more of you at the HP Technology Forum show in June in Las Vegas, or at any of a number of other shows that we will attend later this summer and fall. (Click here for the list.)
On a more regional note, many of you are aware that our main office is located in the Philadelphia, PA, USA area. I was president for many years of the local NonStop regional user group, MATUG, and am pleased to report that AOL will be hosting an upcoming meeting on July 28 in the greater Washington, DC area. If you are interested in attending this show, please let us know and we will be sure to add you to the meeting announcement list.
Take care. We deeply appreciate your support and use of our products.
With Warm Regards,
Paul J. Holenstein
Shadowbase Products Group