The company offers a guarantee against failure (refund of subscription costs), as well as full visibility and management of the system from the customer site. LiveVault's service, which costs $2,950 per year per dominant server, is competitive with the price tag of homegrown strategies, Cramer says, adding that the increasing availability of high-bandwidth, last-mile links to the Internet is a big driver of his business.
Although Tacit Networks' response to our disaster-recovery RFP fell short of addressing the replication needs of Darwin's databases, we were impressed with Tacit's unique approach to data replication for file systems. It's the kind of solution that leading vendors in the database market have sought to deliver for several years--with limited success--and we think it's worth a look.
Tacit approaches data replication from the standpoint of "online data coherency"--in other words, replicating "writes" at one data center immediately at another. The company uses advanced streaming, differencing and compression techniques to transfer updates quickly to large data sets between sites.
A set of specialized networked appliances provides the means to share one global instance of a data set to multiple users.
The Tacit solution works with flat files and doesn't run application software. In fact, it won't work with database files unless they're first converted to a flat-file format. The solution uses any network interconnect that supports NFS (Network File System) or CIFS (Common Internet File System), and leverages specialized appliances that enable WAN file sharing in real time, so that the need for costly replication (defined as the sharing of point-in-time copies) is eliminated completely. A single instance of a data file is instantaneously updated, globally and across the entire enterprise.
Touting its solution as a "groundbreaking answer" to alternatives from EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance and other storage vendors, Tacit insists the offering is a new model that shouldn't be compared with replication and copyediting, or with bandwidth optimization.
Tacit Networks, (866) 822-4869, (908) 757-9950. www.tacitnetworks.com
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
