Its ability to essentially eliminate latency from long distance replication making synchronous and asynchronous unimportant as descriptors. The reduced need for traditional disaster recovery. The use of multiple locations for primary, secondary, tertiary and quarternary, etc. fail-over centers assures continuous, ultra-high availability of operational systems.
Reads are near instantaneous and it assures that all information is backed up continuously in multiple locations.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
In ongoing tests, it eliminates any time delay in responding to a write whether its destination is 1.5 inches away or 1,577,759,040 inches (24,901.5 miles – the circumference of the earth) away. Reads are near instantaneous and further, it assures that all information is backed up continuously in multiple locations without any perceptual delay to the end user. Additional updates to the software provides extraordinary lossless compression and a broader set of data than we experienced in the early iterations. Tests on data transmission failures to a distant data repository deliberately taken down for an extended period showed absolute consistency in sending the missing data and bringing the data repository up to date once the connection was restored.
What needs improvement?
As with everything, expanding the range of its capabilities is the first order of business which I have been assured is underway as we speak. True to their word, Zero Nines is enhancing and expanding the capabilities of the solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have just begun our proof of concept. Every test we are aware of works just as advertised and we are anxious to get through the tests to deploy the system in our production environment.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues with deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues with scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
To date, we have encountered no delays in response and have experienced the highest level of cooperation and engagement.
Technical Support:Superb.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
As this is a greenfield implementation, we have only investigated the alternatives to ZeroNines. We explored several products that claimed to accomplish the same end result but we could not see the same outcome from any of the other products.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is straightforward and fully understandable. The processes are well documented and setup comprises only the identification of the data source whose packets will be transmitted and the destinations where it will land which completes the setup.
What about the implementation team?
We used a combination of vendor assistance and train the trainer to bring our people into the fold. They are very knowledgeable and have an extensive grasp of the operating fundamentals impacted by and enhanced through ZeroNines implementation.
What was our ROI?
Because it enabled us to eliminate several pieces of software and hardware from our build out, it was near instantaneous. We traded the cost of other products designed to provide a backup solution and, therefore our out of pocket was essentially nil. Had we incurred the actual cost, I believe the TCO would have been amortized within 12 calendar months in personnel savings, storage reduction and reduction in complexity of our data center design.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It would be inappropriate to provide costs since there are so many variables which are a function of the complexity of our infrastructure that would not be present in another implementation. I would not want someone to avoid looking at it because our costs kept them from exploring it when their costs would likely be significantly different from ours.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes, traditional synchronous and asynchronous replication. UDPCast is a scheduled replication process that requires significant bandwidth during a quiet time on the WAN. Because our situation runs 24/7/365, we could not operate efficiently when a “Backup” process was going on. ZeroNines moves packets when they occur distributing the bandwidth demand across the full day’s available bandwidth. That worked for us.
What other advice do I have?
Get excited. This is a paradigm shifting technology that can fundamentally change how backup and disaster recovery is done. To paraphrase ZeroNines, It is not about recovery, it is about prevention.
