Quest Software, Inc. has announced new initiatives around SharePlex for Oracle, its Oracle data replication solution, in order to put real-time replication within reach of organizations with small IT departments and tight budgets.
While most solutions for high availability, disaster recovery, and real-time reporting have been targeted at the highest tier customers, Quest is finding that there are many small to medium size organizations whose businesses are going online and have needs for 24-by-7 availability of their databases, Amit Agarwal, director of product management at Quest Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "For these companies, the two things that they really want is a simple and affordable database replication solution that provides them the high availability and real-time reporting capabilities and we provide that in this release."
With this approach, Agarwal, explains, "We are now addressing a completely new segment of the market that we haven't addressed in the past."
As part of these initiatives, Quest has rolled out new pricing options to help organizations cut deployment costs while maximizing their current Oracle database investments. SharePlex for Oracle pricing has been reduced to $10,000 per CPU for Oracle Enterprise Edition, and $9,000 per CPU socket for Oracle Standard Edition. In addition, users get all the functionality in one price, with no additional modules needed. SharePlex for Oracle also now supports Exadata in addition to several other platforms, including Oracle RAC and Oracle releases 8i through 11g, in order to help save organizations the cost of upgrading their infrastructures, says Quest.
And in conjunction with the new pricing options, Quest has made product changes as well that have made the product more simple for companies to install and deploy in their environments, Argarwal adds.
SharePlex for Oracle now offers a simplified installation that is intended to allow users to download, install and use the product in only 15 minutes. "We really made it simple for a small or medium size business looking for copies of the database to exist elsewhere to buy a good solution," he notes.
Quest also recently launched a new SharePlex for Oracle online community, featuring 5-minute "how-to" videos and a user forum where experienced customers and new users can ask questions 24/7, and interact with SharePlex developers and replication experts.
A fully functional SharePlex for Oracle trial is now available for download here.