Catalogic Software just announced the availability of the newest version of its flagship software featuring expanded in-place database virtualization technology -- Catalogic ECX 2.6.

To find out more about this latest release, and better understand the overall landscape for market expansion with this latest version, I spoke with Peter Eicher, Director of Marketing at Catalogic Software.

VMblog:  Good to speak with the folks at Catalogic Software once again.  You're ready to release a new version of your flagship Copy Data Management software, ECX.  Can you give us a refresher on ECX and what it does? 

Peter Eicher:  Our ECX is the only independent "in-place" CDM solution. What we mean by in-place copy data management is that ECX installs into a customer's existing infrastructure and manages the copy processes of existing storage arrays. Copy processes meaning snapshots, replication and creating clones to access data. But it's more than that. ECX also orchestrates between the host or application layer, the hypervisor layer for virtualized servers, and the storage resources. This allows ECX to completely control the lifecycle of application and VM data copies: creating copies, cataloging copies, distributing copies securely as needed, and cleaning up when done.

VMblog:  What's new about this latest version of ECX, you're calling it ECX 2.6?

Eicher:  We're very excited to introduce our latest version of ECX to the market.  Most notable is that our newest version expands our application-aware support to include the InterSystems Caché database and Epic Electronic Health Record, SAP HANA, and extends Microsoft SQL Server support to physical hosts. We're also introducing a user interface refresh, to make using ECX easier than ever before. In particular, it's more intuitive to application and virtualization owners.

VMblog:  What's the overall landscape for market expansion with this latest version? 

Eicher:  One item we are especially eager to see come to fruition is that our support of InterSystems Caché is garnering significant interest from multiple healthcare companies, as well as some of our hardware partners who are prominent in this area.  Having a pipeline of customers awaiting the release is a great barometer of the market and our position in it. And because ECX can also help you with compliance concerns, it's a particularly good fit in the healthcare space.

SAP HANA is of course a major, growing product. And we've found that while server virtualization is everywhere, a sizeable number of organizations are still running their SQL Server infrastructure on physical machines, so adding this support is a big win for us. And we've been able to extend the agentless approach we took with Oracle on physical systems to also support SQL Server.

VMblog:  How about outlining Catalogic's plans for the rest of the year?  What's your roadmap looking like?

Eicher:  We'd love to elaborate on this point, we can't say too much at this time! But we have a lot of cool things in the works throughout this year. Broadly speaking, we will continue to expand our application support, moving into additional databases, especially. And the second half of the year should see some expansion of the storage arrays we support. In addition, we'll have some interesting cloud-based announcements later this year, as well as a series of interesting developments with some of our current hardware partners like Pure Storage. Speaking of Pure Storage, we were excited to see their recent announcement of their Pure Storage FlashArray//X series that uses NVMe. Because it uses the same controller software for copy processes as their //M series, we can support it day one.  And since the focus of the FlashArray//X is on critical database workloads, it's a perfect fit for the database expansion we just announced.   

VMblog:  It seems like it is going to be a busy remainder to the year. Where can we find out more about ECX 2.6? 

Eicher:  We have a lot going on, for sure, but it's a really exciting time for us. We've been hosting a great webinar series that we've called the Catalogic Coffee Talk 15 Minute Webinar series --  short, content-heavy webinars that get right to the point of what we do and how we solve IT challenges around storage, data management, Dev-Test and more. Viewers really seem to like them. We have a bunch of recorded webinars you can watch, and we'll have new ones soon covering our recent updates. And as a bonus, for the live webinars we'll be selecting three attendees to get a Catalogic coffee mug along with a Starbucks gift card. You can access the recorded webinars and check up on new ones at https://catalogicsoftware.com/about/webinars/.

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