Patrick Smith from EPX Discusses Why SharePlex is the Golden Alternative

My name is Patrick Smith. I am currently the lead database administrator for Electronic Payment Exchange EPX, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of North American Bank Card. I have the responsibility of making sure that all of our database systems are constantly available 24 by 7 by 365 and meet all the business requirements of our organization. EPX, the division that I work for, has about 32 employees. North American Bank Card has several thousand overall, so EPX could be viewed as a small division in a larger company. Our company is committed to the complete satisfaction of our customer's requirements for processing their are electronic funds transfers, and doing so in as economic a manner as possible to save them money, and to do so reliably and with a very high level of security. Well, we're pursuing the extension of our database replication to begin to explore migrating certain decision support elements off a core processing platform onto data marts using replication tools. We have literally thousands of users who look at data that comes out of our systems. Our business problems are fairly constant, the need for extremely reliable processing with zero errors. There can be no failures in any aspect of our processing or of replication of our processing. And we have to do so not only with reliability, but with a extremely high level of security within a very tight SLA. We chose share SharePlex because we had a critical business need for completely reliable, relatively high speed replication, which could be verified on an ongoing basis at an affordable total cost of ownership. For replication, previously we were using Oracle's Golden Gate. Our previous solution did not allow us to efficiently and rapidly verify the correctness of replication in order to allow the business to move to the replicated platform with confidence. The native replication features in the Oracle database are not really a form of logical replication. We could have created a logical standby, but we did not feel that that was really an adequate solution, nor would it have allowed the target to be fully read/write. Our previous implementation took 18 months from the initial installation in production to the achievement of what our technical team believed was a successful implementation. However, we experienced numerous problems which required a substantial learning curve to overcome during that 18 month period which resulted in the loss of confidence in the solution by our management team. Our previous solution was presented to us as a relatively low-cost and relatively trouble-free solution, which could be implemented with minimal investment in expertise and training. In our experience that did not prove to be the case. The total cost of ownership is significantly greater due to a requirement for greater investment in internal technical expertise and familiarization. Additional add-ons to the previous solution, if they had been initiated early in the process, might well have resulted in success in that effort. The failure of our organization to make that initial investment was a critical part of the end-to-end success of the effort. However, at the conclusion of the project so much confidence had been lost that it did not matter anymore. Once we discovered SharePlex it took approximately three months until we were able to deploy it successfully into production. That three month period was occasioned by extreme skepticism and lack of confidence on the part of our management due to the previous experience. So we took much longer than would otherwise have been required. Management had failed with a previous solution and was gun shy, so we took plenty of time to evaluate the product. I chose SharePlex because SharePlex was the solution. It worked. It didn't cost an arm or leg. Pretty straightforward if you ask me. SharePlex reduces my personal problems because it's very reliable, it has a very robust tool set to allow me to verify the correctness of replication in a timely fashion, and it's almost entirely trouble-free. It really does not require a great deal of handholding attention and administration. The features that I find most valuable-- other than just a basic reliable functionality-- is the compare, repair facility. If we did not have SharePlex our organization would still be at risk of experiencing an unacceptable delay in the event of the loss of our primary data system, which although it would not necessarily, might very well entail fatal costs to organization with respect to our current customer base. Any interruption in our processing of a significant period can have costs well in excess of a million dollars per incident, direct, not to mention potential downstream indirect costs. The biggest differentiator between SharePlex and its competition is SharePlex's robust reliability, its excellent and highly effective support organization, and its holistic character as a product suite. Quest support is of such quality that I can go on vacation, leave a junior DBA in charge of my SharePlex replication solution with complete confidence that if something goes wrong your support people can guide them to a solution effectively, even though they're juniors. They respond, really respond, rapidly, and they continue to work with us until the problem is resolved. There are no periods of waiting for them to get back in touch with us for extended periods, there are no periods where they repeatedly request technical data again and again. They call us back quickly, usually within 15 or 20 minutes, they engage immediately and they stick with us in addressing the problem until it's fixed. SharePlex has allowed us to practically eliminate a single point of failure risk to the survival of our business by providing us a highly reliable and verifiable fail over platform, which in the event of the loss of our primary we can continue to run our business on. The value of that business continuity is extremely high to my organization. My organization depends upon its customers for its profitability like every other business. Many of those customers were