Features - Storage Innovations:

HYPERION PARTNERS WITH VERITAS TO DELIVER CLUSTERING ABILITY

Hyperion, a global leader in business performance management (BPM) software, has partnered with Veritas to deliver Veritas clustering capability for Hyperion Essbase. Through this partnership, Hyperion will also provide support for Veritas Cluster Server.

The partnership was signed to address the increased customer demand for BPM and business intelligence (BI) solutions with mission-critical performance and availability, said Marc Scheepbouwer, CEO of local Hyperion distributor Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI).

"BPM and BI solutions are increasingly recognised as core to any organisation, helping improve overall business performance," Scheepbouwer said. "In SA (South Africa), our customers view their BI applications as such and therefore can not afford downtime due to maintenance or system failures. Hyperion customers are extending their deployments across their organisations and demanding 24-7 availability. The partnership with Veritas will allow Hyperion to deliver a high-availability solution using a market-leading clustering product."

Supporting the performance and scalability features in its Hyperion BI platform, the company plans to deliver the Veritas clustering capabilities for Hyperion Essbase on several platforms, including Microsoft Windows, HP's HP-UX, IBM's Unix AIX, Sun's Solaris and Linux.

"The Hyperion solution will undergo rigorous testing and certification to verify interoperability with Veritas disaster recovery solutions that enable customers to keep their global BI and BPM systems running at all times," Scheepbouwer said.

According to research firm IDC and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), Veritas Cluster Server is an industry-leading multi-platform clustering solution. The server reduces application and database downtime by monitoring resources in each. The Veritas Cluster Server determines the status of these resources and starts or stops them according to external events.

In the event of an application, database or server fault, Veritas Cluster Server detects the error and takes appropriate action by failing over the services to another server that can best host the application or database. The servers that host the application or database can be located at a single site or across a wide area.

"BPM solutions from Hyperion offer important capabilities to support business decision-making with accurate planning, monitoring and reporting of business and financial applications," Scheepbouwer said. "Companies cannot tolerate downtime of these applications. Veritas Cluster Server will help ensure that these solutions are always available. Together, Veritas and Hyperion will help customers increase efficiency and maximise business productivity."