Was Visions Solutions right to acquire Double-Take?
On May 17th Vision Solutions announced that it was acquiring Double-Take – bringing together its own IBM Power HA/Disaster Recovery business and Double-Take’s strength in the same market with Windows and to a lesser extent Linux. But did it do the right thing?
On the face of it, this was a natural move for Vision. Its strength was in providing availability solutions based on IBM’s 64-bit Power servers. This market is a strong and inflential market, but is nowhere near the size of the Windows market. Also, since there are few players in the more specialist IBM Power market, Vision already holds a reasonable share. For growth, it was essential for Vision to do something. It had choices – it was already partnering with Double-Take to supply Windows to its IBM base, and had other partners for Linux. But by choosing to acquire Double-Take, it is definitely buying a Windows availability provider who also does Linux rather than the other way around.
My concern is that my instincts tell me the Linux market is going to be much more interested in availability than the Windows one. UNIX in general is a more secure and robust operating system than Windows, and therefore people using Linux may have greater expectations of availability, provided through file mirrors, backups, network switchovers and disaster recovery scenarios. In contrast, any user of Windows knows that the system is always going to have its availability problems – just think how many times you have to reboot when you use your own Windows laptop or desktop. The question is therefore; how strong and widespread is the demand for availability on Windows?
At some level, there is demand. For example, a lot of people would like their office data backed up so the can get it back quickly if there is a problem. But beyond this basic data level, it seems to me demand may be limited. Indeed, this seems to be backed up by the fact that in the past year or so Double-Take has suffered slowing growth and market pressures on its finances. Maybe Vision would have been wiser to acquire a Linux availability provider, like SteelEye Software for instance.
Posted in Uncategorized, Vendor news | 
Acquisition, Availability, Double-Take, HA, IBM, Linux, Power systems, Vision Solutions, WindowsLinux v z/OS on IBM mainframes
Five or ten years ago, this sort of question would have been unthinkable, but now mainframe users are increasingly facing a choice between whether to use Linux on System z or z/OS to host new mainframe workloads.
These new workloads may be the result of a consolidation project, or simply taking advantage of flexible architectures like SOA to utilize spare mainframe capacity, but the decision is not an obvious one in either case.
On the one hand, long-time mainframe guys will say that z/OS has grown up with the mainframe and therefore must be the best choice. But IBM has done a lot to its version of Linux for the mainframe, and Linux bigots will be quick to point out that the license costs will be cheaper and there are strong advantages in standardizing on a portable and flexible operating system enterprise-wide. Worst of all, given the polarized nature of IT in general, the decision makers find it hard to get unbiased advice on such a divisive question.
In the end, the answer to the question of whether z/OS or Linux on System z is better is not surprising – “it depends”. This subject is discussed in much more detail in a free Lustratus report, “Choosing the right SOA platform on IBM System z”, available from the Lustratus web store. While this paper focuses particularly on developing or moving SOA workloads onto System z, the analysis applies to any new mainframe workload. Summarizing the arguments in the paper, the major differences that affect the decision are that Linux is designed to offer a common environment across many platforms, and is thus less attuned to individual platform capabilities by definition, and that whereas Linux has been designed for the ‘server’ model where it is used to operating one type of workload, z/OS has been built to handle multiple subsystems from the start.
The common environment aspect of Linux offers flexibility, helps to drive license costs down and leverages widely available skills. The multi-system capabilities of z/OS combined with its close linkage to the System z platform offer the greatest exploitation of System z facilities. But as always the devil is in the details.
Steve