FairCom announces c-treeACE Replication Agent

Note: c-treeACE became FairCom DB in November 2020.

Columbia, Mo. – February 20, 2013 – FairCom, a database company that builds high-performance, engineering-level database technology, has announced the c‑treeACE® Replication Agent, a real-time database synchronization technology that maintains physical and logical separate copies of a database.

“Business challenges, such as high-volume data, extreme dynamic marketing campaigns, and strong competition, have placed demands on the IT infrastructure to provide data at an outstanding pace,” said Randal Hoff, FairCom’s VP of Engineering. “Customers need to have their data available anywhere—in real time—to provide information to stay competitive and keep ahead of the market.”

Although FairCom has long focused on offering replication technology to its market base, with the release of its Replication Agent this spring FairCom introduces the first of its Advanced Modules Series. An approach that will provide customers optional add-ons to further enhance their c‑treeACE environment and give them the choice to get only what they need, and not what they don’t. FairCom is well known for helping customers customize their own database applications and environments. Thus, the company found it only natural to start offering that same customizability within its own product lines.

The c‑treeACE Replication Agent has been developed to use very low bandwidth for sending updated data from one database server to another, while at the same time providing extremely low latency on such updates, achieving near real-time replication. c‑treeACE’s replication support is built-in at the “low-level,” so it is designed for high-speed from the start. Easy to install and maintain, it has minimal impact on the source server to extract the updated data.

There are several ways businesses can take immediate advantage of c‑treeACE Replication Agent, including:

• Failover and High Availability: The Replication Agent provides the capability of having a separate, independent server that is constantly updated with all the data changes of a master server. Users can develop logic in the application so that, in case of an unexpected interruption of the main server, it will simply switch to the replicated server–preserving not only the original data, but also the current transactions. Due to the low bandwidth consumed, the servers can be geographically remote and yet have the updated data immediately available in near real-time.
• Reports or Data Warehouse: The Replication Agent makes a replica of one or more production databases readily available for data warehouse or reporting purposes with no impact on the production servers. Because data can be replicated to different servers—even different platforms—the ctreeACE Replication Agent allows customers to allocate hardware resources as needed.
• Backup: The c‑treeACE Replication Agent may be used to create parallel environments for maintenance purposes, such as backups or migration projects. Quiescing the replicated database for backup allows a non-stop production system to be constantly backed up with no impact on the live transactions. After backup, operation can be resumed, and the Replication Agent brings the replicated database up-to-date with the original database.
• Development: The c‑treeACE Replication Agent is useful for creating mass data for development and QA purposes. In large databases, developers are often forced to test their applications with subsets of the main production database due to limitations on timeframes for extractions and resources. With c‑treeACE Replication Agent, developers are able to have their own replica of the live production data, allowing more effective tests and QA. This superior testing reduces the risk of errors due to lack of test data when going live with updates.

The Replication Agent runs invisibly in the background with little-to-no administrator intervention required. Easy to set up and manage, it comprises an administration utility and several test tools that help one operate and monitor one’s replication environment.

Additional c‑treeACE Replication Agent features include:

• The ability to preserve costly CPU usage for main applications by offloading secondary applications from the main server. Allows less mission critical—though business-crucial—usage, such as reports, data warehouses, data mining or Business Intelligence to run on different servers with the same data.
• A full and near-real time availability main production database, minimizing batch windows, extending time for backup operations, migration projects and maintenance;
• Allowance for off-line development environments for tests, QA, and other “sandboxes” to use real data, avoiding costly extractions of data subsets;
• Low latency and low bandwidth usage for synchronizing data at remote sites, such as stores, branches, and field offices;

FairCom c‑treeACE Replication Agent is available now. In addition to properly licensing each of the c‑treeACE servers involved in the replication environment, the Replication Agent itself must be licensed. Pricing is based off the retail price of the Source Server and the Target Server.

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About FairCom

For more than 30 years, FairCom has built high-performance, engineering-level database technology that empowers developers to meet their specific data management requirements. With low licensing costs, minimal hardware requirements, and little-to-no DBA overhead, FairCom delivers one of the database industry’s lowest total costs of ownership (TCO). Its flagship product, c‑treeACE, provides the most robust solution for ISAM and SQL, allowing developers to enjoy the optimal mix of each technology’s unique performance and ease of data sharing benefits. Thousands of ISVs and 43 percent of the Fortune 100 have selected c‑treeACE to power their applications, including Federal Express, Microsoft, NASA and Visa. FairCom is headquartered in Columbia, Mo., with offices in Europe, South America and Asia (Japan). For more information, visit www.faircom.com.