Database Expertise

database expertise - data and database replication

large image The Need for Replication Technology
In recent years, you discovered that by moving data from your mainframe and distributing it across multiple sites, you minimized communication costs and increased the availability of data that resides locally. But by now you know that your distributed system falls short when you run applications requiring frequent access to data which now resides at multiple, remote sites.
Replication technology is a software solution that can resolve many data access problems associated with such applications. Also, carefully designed replication software can provide fault tolerance, high availability, and disaster recovery mechanisms!

Some Basic Questions About Replication

What is replication?
	Data or database replication consists of technologies and techniques for duplicating and maintaining synchronized copies of data at multiple sites. In effect, a good replication solution allows local access to all your data - even that which actually resides on remote servers.

What are the major benefits?

Replication gives users speedy access to all the data they need, on low-cost hardware at local sites. Since all data in effect resides locally, data access is simplified, response time improves, and communications charges are decreased further. The need for more powerful servers can be eliminated, minimizing hardware costs. Replication also can be used to accomplish gradual system migration, move data to a hot-site backup location, and ensure fault tolerance and high availability of data in your system.

It sounds like simply copying data! What are the challenges?

Successful implementation is heavily dependent on your needs and environment. In addition to creating "copies" of data, you must move the "copies" and changes to the original data across your network. And you must keep the "copies" synchronized at all times! You also need to decide what granularity of replication you want, how tightly your data must be synchronized, whether to partition your data, the number of communication lines and bandwidth to allocate, and define a clear set of conflict resolution rules. These are just a few of the preliminary challenges you will face. There are even greater challenges to achieve high availability or fault tolerance as well.

UNIF/X - The Replication Experts

At UNIF/X, our people have participated firsthand in the creation and evolution of replication technology for distributed systems since 1990. Even before products such as Sybase Replication Server, Oracle Parallel Server, and HA for Sun were introduced, we reviewed and analyzed alternative theoretical approaches to replication.

In 1991, our developers designed, developed, and implemented the first software product providing replication, fault tolerance, high availability, and network management tools for distributed database systems that was marketed worldwide. Consisting of over 120,000 lines of code in C and C++, this product was sold to multinational clients such as Moody's Investor Service, Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman, Chemical Bank, Salomon Brothers, and others*.

Subsequently, we have also designed and implemented both small and large-scale custom replication solutions on various RDBMS's, hardware platforms, and operating systems for a roster of distinguished customers.

More information about our experience is available upon request.

Sybase and Replication Server are trademarks of Sybase, Inc.Oracle Parallel Server is a trademark of The Oracle Corporation HA for Sun is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

*This product was developed for and is owned by AFIC Technologies, Inc.

Unif/x Replication Services

Because we have been involved with replication since the inception of this technology, and have worked with an array of commercially available replication products as well as small and large-scale custom replication solutions, UNIF/X is in a unique position to compare, contrast, and improve on the various approaches used by different vendors.

We can assist your organization in meeting the challenge of deploying this mission-critical technology. Whether you are considering off-the-shelf products, want to design your own replication technology, or just don't know how to solve this problem yet, we can help:

Analyze how replication can be used optimally in your system

Compare alternative theoretical approaches for you

Evaluate commercially available replication products

Install any vendor's replication product, customize it, and train users

Design, develop, and implement custom replication solutions

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