Vendor Briefs, March 2006

Stone Bond Technologies Gets IT Together

"This product is all about moving and working with data," says Nikhil Roy, vice president of product development for Stone Bond Technologies (http://www.stonebond.com). Roy talked to us during the beta-testing phase of Stone Bond Enterprise Enabler Server 2006, the latest release of the company's integration suite of products.The products work together to let you remove barriers between data, applications, the development environment, and users by combining Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Extraction,Transformation, and Loading (ETL) in one environment.The latest release of the suite includes a sophisticated process designer for modeling business and data workflows, a visual data mapper for complex mixed relational and hierarchical input and output, and a process monitor that provides real-time tracking of server activity, including processes and transformations.The combined products let you build and maintain one or thousands of processes and data interfaces while detecting and managing change throughout your environment. Based on the .NET Framework 2.0, Enterprise Enabler Server 2006 is compatible with SQL Server 2005 and earlier releases.
—Dawn Cyr

NetEx Goes the Rental Route

We recently spoke with Robert MacIntyre, vice president of business development and marketing at NetEx (http://www.netex.com), about his company's HyperIP Data Migration Optimizer (DMO) program, which uses a unique rental philosophy to accelerate large-scale data migration over existing IP networks and provides a simple, cost-effective alternative to Fibre Channel over IP technologies."We're providing a creative, fresh look at data migrations," MacIntyre said, "and we're helping large integrators and resellers mitigate problems with their applications." NetEx targets the HyperIP DMO program toward qualified storage resellers, project consultants, and System Integrators (SIs) who need to provide their clients with a means to accelerate their data-migration requirements on a short-term project basis (3 to 6 months). Current data-migration customers have seen a 300 to 700 percent increase in effective data throughput when deploying HyperIP. Once the HyperIP DMO project is complete, customers can redeploy the HyperIP appliances for other migration initiatives or return them to NetEx. "HyperIP DMO overcomes many transport limitations and provides a simple solution with predictable performance that operates over standards-based IP networking infrastructures," MacIntyre said. Monthly rental fees start at $2043 per system, with a renewable 3-month minimum term.
—Jason Bovberg

TimeSpring Addresses Top Concerns

Email backup, retention, and recovery are top concerns for Exchange Server administrators. TimeSpring Software (http://www.timespring.com) hopes to address these needs with its new TimeData for Exchange, continuous data protection (CDP) software that automatically captures changes to Exchange Server data in real time. TimeSpring's Agnes Lamont explained that the product installs a lightweight agent on an Exchange Server 2000 or later server to capture changes ranging from new messages to Exchange events, then stores this data in a repository on a Windows server (which can be located offsite). The product is compatible with DAS or SANs and can support Exchange clusters. Aside from storing data, TimeData for Exchange provides search and recovery tools that let you find and restore a message, mailbox, or storage group (SG), without resorting to a brick-level backup. TimeData is also available for SQL Server and NTFS. Pricing starts at $3995 per server (200 mailboxes).
—Lisa Pere

sqlSentry Optimizes Scheduling and Notification Tasks

How much time do you spend reviewing job logs for failures, resolving job failures, or adjusting jobs to reduce schedule and resource conflicts? InterCerve sqlSentry 2.5 (http://www.sqlSentry.net) includes full support of SQL Server 2005 and many enhancements to its already comprehensive SQL Server job management system.

The latest sqlSentry release frees up more of DBAs' time by providing advanced scheduling features such as fully customizable visual calendars, finer job filtering capabilities, reproducible jobs and alerts for multiple servers, and expanded event-source support. Now, you can set notification at the global and object levels and conduct alerting and performance monitoring in non-SQL Server events and shared resources such as SAN and NAS.

SqlSentry 2.5 was developed by DBAs for DBAs."We listened to their requests for more insight, power and, control when working in the SQL Server enterprise," said Ken Teeter, vice president of sales and marketing for sqlSentry."We're confident that once a DBA tries sqlSentry he'll never want to work without it."
—Trisha Pendley