Carbonite acquired Double-Take, a data replication and disaster recovery option, in early 2017. The technology now powers Carbonite Availability, the now Carbonite supported high availability and data replication product.
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SharePlex
Score 10.0 out of 10
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SharePlex from Quest Software is a data replication software offering near real-time replication and supporting a wide variety of databases.
I believe it would work well with continuous replication in a DR scenario with no time limits and having the ability to fail back is a bonus, but in a one off move the decision to restrict the time it can sync for has proven to be an issue for us.
SharePlex is best suited for replicating relatively small but steady streams of data, instead of huge amounts of data surge. Keep in mind that it relies on database logs (redo logs in Oracle) to replicate data in the form of "messages", and therefore it is mandatory to put the database in forced logging mode - that may be a prohibiting factor in some situations.
License management is poor and the online system is very restrictive, We are using a one time "Move" product that has a fixed life ... but sometimes in a small team other high priority tasks come along.
We lost all access to all licenses in the portal and all support because we hadn't used them in ninety days. Very poor service. We did get access back eventually but it took a lot of "bargaining".
Failover isn't always as smooth as it could be. VMDKs don't release properly and the move fails and has to be done manually. Not hard just frustrating. VMWare to VMWare.
Documentation: There are some areas where the documentation is weak or dated. In particular, running SharePlex on RAC is a more involved process than the implementation guides would have you believe. When reaching out for assistance, the answer from Dell (a few years ago) was to engage their consulting team.
Built in scripts/agents: SharePlex comes with a handful of monitoring and management scripts that can be run as cron jobs. Unfortunately, these scripts are primitive and rigid, requiring the user to hard-code values into the script body and limiting their usefulness when you're running multiple replication streams. Some of the methods and dependencies are heavy. We ended up writing custom scripts that do what we need but it would be helpful if there were greater functionality and flexibility out of the box.
Compared to other tools, there is not as wide (or at least as active) a user presence. If you're having difficulties you may have to engage a consultant since it's less likely that you'll find an answer in a forum or blog post.
Cabonite Availability is a very practical and useful tool that can help any business weather any type of IT disaster. The ease and quickness of restoring data helps us provide as seamless an experience as possible. Many times our customers will never know there was an outage. This brings confidence in our brand and improves our organization's standing and reputation.
Once through to support it is very good and they have assisted us through a number of issues. I don't always think that they provide a solution, more a workaround, but in a move situation where each copy is moving once, that isn't an issue. I'd be more concerned if we were using it to manage a DR scenario.
Support is very responsive. They take ownership of the problems and see them through to the finish. When a bug is found they work towards developing testing and making the fix available to us to solve the problem.
Zerto is a very nice tool when performing virtual to virtual replication. If you were to add a physical server in the mix, it would not be able to handle that server or the data on it. Veeam is a way is similar to Zerto where it only has the ability to handle virtual to virtual replication. The big difference is that it's not continuous replication. It uses a snapshot technology to grab the changes from the last snapshot and replicate that over.
SharePlex was a clear winner in comparison to its competitors. It beats GoldenGate on price, providing equivalent features and performance at a fraction of the price and without the need to license costly Oracle features at the database level. DB Visit was a strong contender for us as well and it is an excellent product I would also recommend, but it did not have quite enough of a user and community presence and penetration for our management to feel comfortable with.
