StarQuest Ventures
Real-time Data Replication for Heterogeneous Environments

What usually limits CIOs from accessing cutting edge information technology? Data. The cloud, big data applications, and the latest in business intelligence all require CIOs to make data available to heterogeneous environments accurately and rapidly. But accommodating these modern demands on data requires current data flowing to many places at once.

Enter StarQuest Data Replicator (SQDR). StarQuest Ventures’ flagship product provides heterogeneous real-time data replication from virtually any data store to any data store. With SQDR, data can be integrated across heterogeneous environments with sub-second latency, freeing data from the limitations of a single store and the capabilities of that store. This data flexibility enables CIOs to leverage data on whichever platform offers the most useful characteristics.

“We want CIOs to choose the right data platform for their needs, not have the data platform determine what they can or cannot do,” says Paul Rampel, President of StarQuest Ventures. “It’s your data after all; you should deploy it how you want.” This vendor-agnostic philosophy runs counter to the Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft business models, which try to lock customers into their platforms. For those major players, keeping a customer exclusively on their platform can be worth millions and they make leveraging outside data stores as expensive and difficult as possible. “When companies try to move away from a vendor’s application sets, they are being held up for the replication solution. With StarQuest, they can get the data replication solution for a fifth of the cost.”

These vendor lock-in strategies also lead to poor IT decisions. “Too many CIOs are abandoning high-performing databases prematurely and too many others are adopting emerging technologies too slowly because of data integration challenges,” continues Rampel.

“Real-time replication helps companies enjoy the benefits of both the old and the new without sacrifice.” Rampel shares the example of a StarQuest customer in logistics that uses SQDR to offload reporting from its iSeries running DB2 for i to a Microsoft SQL Server running Tableau. Another customer in the healthcare industry replicates transactional data from a set of Oracle databases to a SQL Server on Azure, which is used to ensure compliance with the Health Insurance and Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Real-time replication helps companies enjoy the benefits of both the old and the new without sacrifice

Within this vendor-agnostic paradigm, a company can evolve gradually, adapting to the times without disruptive infrastructure overhauls. A common data modernization technique using real-time replication is zero-downtime migration to the cloud, according to Rampel. He explains that real-time replication allows a company to run source and destination systems in parallel, creating a test environment to ensure that no mission-critical functions will be affected post-switchover. This functionality has enabled StarQuest customers to seamlessly migrate to widely used cloud offerings such as Azure or AWS, or to more specialized clouds such as LightEdge.

SQDR is remarkably easy-to-use whatever the use-case. “We are open standards-based and client-centric, which means we are able to install a solution using point-and-click technology in five minutes and configure the product in under an hour,” says Rampel. “Once live, our replication is remarkably robust. Many of our customers have been running SQDR in the background for years.”