Rick Schiller tells how SharePlex® can alleviate concerns of moving to the cloud

Hi. This is Carlos Jimenez, Product Marketing Manager for Quest Software. I'm here with Quest Product Manager for SharePlex, Rick Schiller. Hey Rick, so what are the biggest challenges that enterprises are facing in terms of moving to open source or cloud? So you know, I think it's important to consider what exactly the customer is trying to do. But what you'll see is that there are common concerns sort of across those, whether you're just trying to move to the cloud on the same platform or move to the cloud on a different platform, right? They'll have some differences between them, but some commonalities. Of course, the biggest concern that people always have is how am I going to avoid downtime, and how am I going to avoid risk? So SharePlex has been designed to help deal with those problems, right? So one of the big problems is, the challenge of downtime is how am I going to get my export, bring it over to this new platform-- whether it's cloud or VM, or simply I'm moving off of an old AIX box onto a Linux box-- is how am I going to actually get the data moved over there, imported up and running, and then switched over without significant downtime? So SharePlex is designed to handle those replication cases, and allow you to keep your primary instance up and basically queuing up the data until it's-- until you've got that other instance ready. It can catch up so that then you can do your cut over. One of the other concerns really is risk. People are highly concerned about, you know, I can get this moved over there, and I can be pounding on it, I can test it, and you know, I think it's all good to go, they turn it back on and something goes horribly wrong, right? So customers are always looking for some sort of a fallback strategy. SharePlex also allows you to do something like that, right? So you can get the systems up and sync. You can have things up and running. And when you're ready to do your cut off, you can do all sorts of interesting things, right? You can start to move just a little bit of the traffic over there, and let it replicate back and work in sort of an active-active scenario. You can slowly ramp that up, or you can just do your whole cut over onto your new system, right? At that time you do the cut over, you can also then reverse your replication direction so that you can now redirect-- cut all your traffic over to your new instance and allow that to replicate back. So you can start queuing up those changes, and then actually pushing them back to that primary or your initial server. So that gives customers some flexibility and, really, risk mitigation. In case the wheels go off, we can fail back over. When you're talking about moving to open source platforms, that's a, you know, that's a trickier situation. Now you're talking about how do I deal with conversion schemas and all of those types of things, right? And how can I move those data over, and how can I keep them in sync? So one of the reasons that SharePlex was designed to be heterogeneous and to support other platforms was, not only just to allow read replication for other sorts of reporting use cases, but to handle those same sorts of migration use cases, right? Allow me to replicate over to this other instance, let me sort of test over there, and then do my fail over with little downtime.