enhancements

Syncsort Announces Data Protection 4.0

August 30, 2011

Peter Eicher

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Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

As usual, VMworld started with a bang. The first night at the welcome reception is always the craziest. Nearly all the attendees wander the show floor simultaneously and there is a great buzz in the air (having a rock band playing not too far away only added to the noise and excitement!).  

The first three hours of VMworld 2011 were packed with non-stop action in the Syncsort booth.  We talked to literally hundreds of customers and propsects in that brief period of time, and ran at least five or six showings of our ‘Race to Recovery’ challenge (tell you the truth, it was so busy I can’t even remember the exact number of times we ran the Race – and I’m one of the presenters!).

Tuesday at the show, news takes the spotlight as Syncsort announces the upcoming release of Syncsort Data Protection 4.0, a key component of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution that we are demonstrating at booth #527. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in the release:

  • Agentless VMware backup support. This provides management and ease-of-use benefits to users by letting them more easily protect virtual machines. (While Agentless backup has its place, we still think agents are important for some use cases – more on that in an upcoming blog post!)
  • Rapid VM recovery from Agentless backups. We are bringing our patented Instant Virtualization technology to the Agentless space, allowing you to restore entire VMs in less than two minutes.
  • Remote backup enhancements to better enable cloud deployments, for both private and public clouds.
  • Enhancements to storage efficiency (squeezing out even more disk savings) and backup management (major reductions in backup job overhead).
  • A new, improved user experience in terms of both user interface and documentation.

Version 4.0 is scheduled to ship within 90 days from today. Once we get past VMworld and all the non-stop activity, I’ll be blogging more about the details of these new features. We are also announcing today that EVO Merchant Services, the largest privately-held credit card processor, is using NSB to reduce backup and recovery complexity. EVO uses NSB to protect its mixed environment of 250+ physical and virtual servers.

Meanwhile, you can stop by our booth and see for yourself, and maybe even run a recovery as part of the ‘Race to Recovery.’  Last night, our iPad 2 winner was Sean Bettencourt, who recovered a VM in a blazing 1 minute and 12 seconds! Not bad for never having even touched the product before.

Yes, it’s really that simple to use, and that fast.  We’re giving away another iPad 2 today, so check the demo schedule at the booth and see if you can’t be today’s ‘Race to Recovery’ winner.

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A Closer Look at DMExpress 6.5

November 9, 2010

Keith Kohl

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Director of Product Management, Data Integration

Hello from Rat World…I mean Orlando!  I am at the TDWI conference here where yesterday, Syncsort made a significant announcement that extends our world-class Data Integration Acceleration to the market.  I wanted to take a moment and explain some of the product related enhancements we are adding to DMExpress with this new release, DMExpress 6.5.

For starters, we are adding metadata integration into the DMExpress product.  This is one of the most important features we can provide in the world of DI Acceleration.  Now we can “snap” in DMExpress into existing DI/ETL environments and co-exist.  Many companies have made strategic decisions with DI vendors that have more extensive capabilities than Syncsort (like data profiling, comprehensive metadata management, etc.), but many of you have told us that these products need some performance boost in certain places.  Enter Syncsort with DMExpress. 

Our metadata integration capabilities will allow our customers to import existing DI/ETL jobs/maps into DMExpress and pre-build DMExpress jobs & tasks.  Probably more importantly, we can export back the execution-time metadata into these platforms in order to maintain data lineage.  This is very important for compliance, auditing and reporting.  Watch this blog for more soon on metadata interchange.

We’ve done a lot more in the DMExpress 6.5 release too.  We have added a lookup function.  This lookup will be a one-to-one lookup from a reference source file or a database.  Because it is implemented as a function rather than a task-level transformation (DMExpress talk), multiple lookups can be performed in one task.  One customer I showed this to actually used the word “cool!” Some may say (not me, of course!) that he needs to get out more often, but all joking aside it is going to provide a huge benefit and flexibility to our customers.  We can also “push” the lookup into the database if the reference source is a database.

The Teradata Parallel Transporter (TPT) is gaining traction with Teradata customers.  Earlier this year, Syncsort added support for the Teradata load and unload utilities, including FastLoad, MultiLoad, TPump, and FastExport.  With DMExpress 6.5, we are adding TPT support for the target or load.  We’ll add source early next year.

We have also improved developer productivity with this release.  First, we’ve added a “diff” capability to see the difference between jobs and tasks, in the context a user can really use.  Text AND HTML are supported.  The Expression Builder also now maintains formatting, spacing, and indenting for easier reading and maintaining of expression.  I’m the first to admit we should have already done this long ago…

Finally, I have to mention performance.  Wait, maybe I should have started with this one since we are the fastest engine on the planet! We have improved performance for aggregations with multiple “group-by” keys.  We have seen CPU usage decrease by 30 percent,  thus also improving overall elapsed time. How cool is that! Okay, maybe I’m the one who needs to get out more often…

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The Scoop at Syncsort…DMX 6.2 is Now Available!

September 22, 2010

Stephanie Best

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Director of Marketing, Data Integration

Today at the 360 IT event in London, Syncsort announced the availability of DMExpress 6.2.  DMX 6.2 has some great new enhancements that our customers will love because they were designed to help them maximize existing technology investments and significantly improve data integration performance. A few of the key enhancements in DMX 6.2 are:

  • Dynamic Workfile Compression enables you to improve operational efficiency and generate cost savings through dramatically shortened elapsed time and reduced disk space.
  • A new Automated Upgrade Utility that makes it extremely easy to benefit from new versions of DMExpress without having to resave each job and task individually. 

I encourage you to check out our press release for complete details on DMX 6.2 and to stay tuned for some more exciting data integration announcements from Syncsort in the near future!

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