Lakeview Consolidates Availability Management
Users of Lakeview Technology's AS/400 availability management and data movement product suites can look forward to several new enhancements to the companies product line during the second and third quarters of this year.
With the new Version 4 Release 1 of Lakeview's MIMIX availability management solution, the product has been tuned for easier use and more effective component integration. The interface for V4R1 provides a single management point for the starting and stopping of all component functions, a single journal management interface and a single message log for all MIMIX products.
Similarly, Lakeview announced a new version of its OmniEnterprise data movement product suite, which now supports the AS/400 platform and enables data to be shared among all leading relational databases and DB2/400. Version 3.1 of OmniEnterprise is used primarily by corporations to move and synchronize data between OS/390, Unix and Windows NT platforms running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Informix, Sybase and DB2 databases.
"With applications like e-commerce, data warehousing and critical enterprise systems such as SAP R/3, companies increasingly must ensure their systems and data are continuously available to all users," says Ken Zaiken, VP of development for Lakeview (Oak Brook, Ill.). "We've engineered MIMIX V4R1 to make this task much easier."
As data warehousing and e-commerce applications catch on and Y2K problems are resolved, companies will look to add availability management solutions like Lakeview's, according to Randy Corke, the company's director of marketing. While the penetration rate of this kind of technology is only five percent now, availability management solutions are expected to capture 25 percent of the market by the year 2000, he adds.
"It's not just availability and recovery issues. If I'm doing an application upgrade or file reorganizations or running batch jobs -- how do I manage the system? It's not just about crashes," Zaiken points out. "People have historically looked at availability and application management as system internals. But the needs are coming from the business."
In MIMIX V4R1, the database replication component (MIMIX DB2 Replicator for AS/400) and object replication component (MIMIX Object Replicator for AS/400) have been integrated to allow them to communicate and share a common data group, definitions for systems, communications and journaling environments. This component integration simplifies management, reduces duplication and allows for faster, error-free communication. Used together, these components provide a replication solution for DB2/400 data as well as OS/400 objects, Integrated File System objects, spool files and document library objects. As part of this integration, MIMIX Object Replicator has been re-engineered for greater performance and functionality.
In addition to AS/400 support, OmniEnterprise Version 3.1 includes a transaction staging feature designed to allow other applications to access change-based data and other transaction information and provide customers with a history of source data transactions.
"This latest release of OmniEnterprise is the first step in our commitment to enable heterogeneous data movement to the AS/400 community and to Lakeview's MIMIX customer base," said Bill Merchantz, president and CEO of Lakeview. "We have seen a growing need for AS/400 users to share information with other Unix, NT and mainframe applications. OmniEnterprise is the solution."
MIMIX V4R1 supports a range of OS/400 releases -- V3R2, V3R7, V4R1, V4R2, V4R3 and V4R4 -- with the ability to replicate data between different release levels of OS/400. V3R2 installations of MIMIX/400 and MIMIX/Object can be converted into the V4R1 MIMIX format. MIMIX V4R1 product suite is expected to ship in late summer 1999.
OmniEnterprise Version 3.1 is expected to be available in late spring of this year. Pricing varies by configuration and machine class, and starts at less than $5,000.