IBM AIX and SUN Solaris users get data integrity, availability boost; CLARiion expands High Availability Management software family

Business Wire, July 10, 1995

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 10, 1995--The CLARiion Business Unit of Data General Corp. today expanded its popular GuardWare and Applications Transparent Failover (ATF) software to SUN Solaris and IBM AIX users. Part of CLARiion's High Availability Management software family, GuardWare and ATF have become the high-availability solutions of choice for enterprises running mission critical applications on Oracle, Sybase and Informix relational database products (RDBMS).

"There is nothing more certain or ideal for today's enterprises requiring system level data protection than CLARiion disk arrays running GuardWare and ATF," said Peter Gibbs, Director of Marketing for the CLARiion Business Unit. "These flexible high-availability products offer proven data protection capabilities for users facing the tough challenge of managing cost-effective client/server installations."

Monitoring SUN and/or IBM servers that share a CLARiion disk array, GuardWare monitors both hardware and software failures and automatically directs user-specified recovery procedures. This application, easily customized, lets users create tailored failover protection for individual applications and runs as an application on Solaris, SUN/OS and AIX servers with no system reconfigurations and kernel modifications.

Taking system availability even further, CLARiion's ATF software provides failover protection starting with the SCSI adapter in the servers themselves. ATF builds on CLARiion's dual active storage processor capability by facilitating automatic and transparent re-routing of SCSI I/O (input/output) traffic in the event of an I/O path failure.

"The CLARiion software family is designed to ensure that no single point of failure will limit users from access to mission critical applications or resources, greatly extending the capabilities of IBM and SUN systems," said Larry Hemmerich, Vice President and General Manager, CLARiion Business Unit.

A Wide Range of Features

GuardWare offers a fully redundant architecture and features such as:

o two high availability daemons on each server to monitor system status and each other. If a hardware failure occurs, the daemons initiate recovery scripts specified by the user;

o redundant paths to continuously monitor the heartbeat connection between servers and ensure failover capabilities;

o standby Ethernet connection to impersonate the IP address of failed server, allowing transparent client access if a server fails.

GuardWare supports symmetric operations in 1-1 installation, allowing both servers to act as primary application providers. System failures result in the surviving server taking over the organization's mission-critical applications. GuardWare is also available with 2-1 and 3-1, where a backup server provides failover support for two or three primary servers. CLARiion delivers a combination of dual active storage processors, mirrored-write cache, RAID 5, and redundant, hot swappable components providing an unmatched storage subsystem for mission critical applications.

GuardWare for SUN servers is available now and for IBM RS/6000 for AIX servers, will be available in September, 1995. Prices start at $14,995.00. Both products are available through a worldwide network of strategic partners serving the IBM and SUN markets.

The CLARiion Business Unit is part of Data General Corporation. CLARiion leading disk array technology has been protecting customer data and information in the marketplace for more than three years. CLARiion supports a variety of platforms, including SUN Sparc systems, IBM RS/6000 servers, NetWare, NT, OS/2, SCO UNIX and DEC Alpha Servers running Digital UNIX.

Data General is an open systems company that specializes in providing servers, storage systems and services to information technology users worldwide. The company, headquartered in Westboro, reported revenues of $1.12 billion in fiscal 1994.

CONTACT: Data General Corp.

Jim Dunlap (508) 898-6546

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Kathy Ficaro (508) 898-5698

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Edelman Public Relations

Kendra R. Collins (212) 704-8286

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George W. Goldman (212) 704-4440