InfoScale - Americas

I am a consultant who works with InfoScale . I mostly use InfoScale  around applications, not really the web based on my experience with it.

I work primarily with Cluster Server. As an instructor and contractor, I teach the product to other administrators. The biggest part of the product that I have been discussing lately is Cluster Server and the replication, including using the new WORM storage for ransomware protection.

I could discuss the features and capabilities of InfoScale that I have found most valuable for an extensive amount of time, but the general data protection across so many different areas stands out. One does not have to be tied to any particular vendor, and you can make replicated copies over distances with the global option. The ability to use WORM storage for ransomware protection is what I think is the hottest topic in the whole market right now. The ability to work with all different kinds of storage vendors and capabilities is a significant feature at this moment.

I find InfoScale's automated stack-aware recovery feature to be beneficial when recovering from a ransomware event because anything automated is always helpful in a crisis situation. The automated tool is excellent; this is a product that has been proven as I have been working with it for twenty-three to twenty-four years. The company knows what they are doing when it comes to automating and knowing what commands to run for recovery. The simplicity of it in a panic is a significant part of its appeal.

InfoScale's ability to maintain data integrity and availability during a cyber event such as a ransomware attack is excellent. Having the ease of control over the different copies available and being able to bring up another copy within minutes in a safe location on secure storage is invaluable for business continuity. Getting back to business in minutes instead of hours and days is incomparable.

My experience with InfoScale's feature for application-aware failover has been excellent. The heartbeat mechanisms involved in recognizing when a failover needs to take place have even improved with the IMF feature. The system is very quick in recognizing issues; the kernel is the first to recognize a problem with IMF and alerts the agent so action can be taken.

This has been very beneficial for my operations; the availability of everything in quick order is a significant advantage. The monitoring capability allows me to see what is happening with the applications and products overall at any time, which has been excellent.

InfoScale has played a role in reducing downtime, including planned downtime when I can quickly switch over for maintenance. However, unplanned events are where the bigger downtime comes from. The ability for InfoScale to monitor what is happening and react in a timely manner is significant, allowing me to get back to business in minutes rather than hours and days.

The newer team that has purchased InfoScale from Veritas has been discussing changes to the graphical interface to make it more user-friendly, and I encourage that. I use the command line most often myself, and with my years of experience, I am comfortable there, but improving the GUI is a good idea.

I have used the solution a few months ago.

The stability and reliability of InfoScale have always been excellent; I have never encountered any stability issues with the product itself. Any stability issues come from the hardware, not from InfoScale.

The scalability of InfoScale is amazing. One of the things I loved about the product from the beginning is that you are never stuck with any choice you make. You can change your mind, do a re-layout or relocation, or anything else without needing to tear it all down and start over again. Being able to scale up and scale out wherever you want is relatively simple.

I have communicated with InfoScale's technical support and customer service.

My experience with the technical support specialists has generally been very good. When I am on-site, I sometimes get anxious because I want to get the customer back in business quickly. If I do not see the issue right away, I open a support ticket, but nine out of ten times, I find the problem myself before the support team gets back to me. They have always been very helpful when I have needed them. However, I often open tickets prematurely just because I want to expedite the process for the customer.

Based on my experience with support, I would rate them a nine, only because occasionally the first person I talk to does not know more than I do and it needs to be escalated to reach someone more knowledgeable. These cases typically involve more difficult problems, so I still rate them very high for their support.

The initial setup and deployment of InfoScale is quite smooth. The installer has been good all along and has even improved over time. It is very efficient at understanding what you need, and as long as you are aware ahead of time of requirements such as cabling, system names, and the communication, the installation and configuration process is straightforward and quite smooth.

I have not been in a situation where we have had serious problems; we have always gotten ahead of issues before they arise. The biggest tangible benefit comes from having the knowledge of how long it takes to rebuild from a disaster. People reach out to us because they want to avoid those problems, and I have successfully helped them with this.

The biggest challenges I have faced over the years mostly come from the training side, explaining some of the under-the-covers features so that people understand how it works. I remember twenty-some years ago hearing it for the first time and wondering if I would ever understand what it meant. The longer you work with something, the more natural it becomes, allowing me to explain it to new users better. The terminology can vary between different products, which sometimes complicates understanding.

My customers usually prefer a combination of deployment options for InfoScale; more and more are moving to the cloud rather than maintaining a physical DR location. They typically start on-premises but with the objective of replicating or duplicating to the cloud for security reasons.

When it comes to cloud preferences, I refer to the big three regarding the formerly known Veritas products; Amazon, Google, and Azure  cloud are the most common choices among my customers.

I have been impressed with InfoScale from the very beginning all those years ago. The ability to handle array failures, whether it is just a disk or connectivity issues to an array, has been very beneficial. The failover features and clustering capabilities have been incredible; another big part of it is not being tied to a vendor. If we have an office in a different city or country that is getting a better deal on hardware, it does not matter what they are using. InfoScale communicates with all of them and allows for data migration and replication, providing significant flexibility.

I have been researching it and looking into it, and it looks excellent. I have also worked with all of the Veritas products in the past, so when it came to recovery, I was more focused on the NetBackup area. The fact that we can have a copy that is protected and replicated quickly is more beneficial than recovering from a backup.

I give this review a rating of ten out of ten.

I have worked on implementing various InfoScale  products based on customer requirements, including Storage Foundation, High Availability, and Cluster File System to support high availability and workload distribution. I also have experience implementing InfoScale  for Kubernetes  to support disaster recovery (DR) solutions in Kubernetes  environments.

The features or capabilities of InfoScale that I have found the most valuable and useful so far are high availability and service failover where we can create resource groups in the traditional cluster, which allow us to failover services and data volumes, and in InfoScale for Kubernetes , we can implement a DR solution that allows us to bring up the application from the DR side in case of a disaster at the production site.

In a live incident scenario, the data replication process occurs in real-time, and compared to other products, this data replication feature works effectively, ensuring data availability, and we can implement this scenario using Veritas Volume Replication (VVR), which is the most usable feature in InfoScale for data replication.

Data integrity in InfoScale is ensured by the VxFS journaling filesystem, application-level transactions, and optional checksums to detect corruption. Availability is provided through mirroring, clustering, and multipathing. Snapshots provide application-consistent recovery points, while ransomware protection is handled through snapshot rollback and replication strategies, as per my understanding.

In my opinion, while InfoScale provides clear documentation to implement the solution, the setup is somewhat complex and troubleshooting requires deep knowledge about clustering; providing video guides for storage solutions and handling clustering would be beneficial.

InfoScale primarily focuses on high availability and disaster recovery and has already implemented DR solutions with Veritas Volume Replication, but for failing over applications from production to DR, it requires some complex steps; simplifying these steps would be an advantage.

InfoScale pricing is high for small customers but acceptable for enterprise use, and a lower price could help increase mid-market adoption.

I have been working with InfoScale for around two years.

InfoScale is reliable as it offers high availability and disaster recovery solutions based on my experience.

InfoScale scales well in enterprise environments through clustering and shared storage, allowing multiple nodes to manage workloads efficiently depending on the infrastructure.

I often communicate with the technical support of InfoScale.

In my impression, InfoScale's support specialists are knowledgeable, providing remote and ticket-based assistance while giving quick solutions and thorough documentation; I believe they offer better help.

I have experience with Solaris Cluster for high availability, and it is still used in some customer environments based on their requirements. However, for Kubernetes-based environments, we did not previously use a dedicated DR solution. With InfoScale, we are able to address this gap by providing real use cases for ensuring both data and application availability, including automated failover and continuous protection without requiring manual intervention.

My experience with the initial setup and deployment of InfoScale involved implementing it in a traditional method on-premises using Storage Foundation and High Availability and Cluster File System, requiring physical layer setup, VLAN assignments, and package installations across servers with specific configurations for disk-based and majority-based fencing.

In terms of initial setup and deployment ease, the documentation provided is clear, making it easier to set up, although troubleshooting can be difficult due to extensive logs that require deep dives.

I have mainly used InfoScale with Oracle Database  on Solaris systems and application-aware failover. My advice would be to properly configure the Oracle agents and resource groups, as this ensures fast failover and reduced downtime, typically around one minute.

Based on everything I have shared on various aspects of InfoScale, I would rate it 8.5 out of 10.

My work focused on a high-availability environment where customers maintained two or three data centers designed for disaster recovery solutions. I managed local clusters as well as global clusters, and when a service failed in a particular environment, it automatically moved to a different region. The entire solution was designed with InfoScale at its core.

I find InfoScale's automated Stack Aware Recovery feature to be very beneficial when recovering from ransomware events. The system automatically moved services to alternate nodes, behavior I observed while running on UNIX systems that had underlying issues. Veritas was very active and proactive, notifying me in advance about cluster conditions and recommended actions. From a recovery perspective, my main goal was to establish application recovery, which is why I selected this solution. Some critical machines in the environment still run Veritas because it excels at recovery, is easy to understand, and facilitates root cause analysis. Most of the root cause analyses I performed over ten years were not related to Veritas. I consider it a great product that meets expectations. The primary concern is licensing cost, as the customer is unwilling to invest further and has begun cost-cutting measures. With cloud adoption, they are moving workloads to the cloud, believing it offers greater benefits than on-premises solutions. All VCS  instances and Veritas clusters ran on-premises only, with nothing moved to the cloud. Most licenses have already expired, and the customer has allowed me to continue using them while exploring alternative solutions. The application team is redesigning applications from scratch, with several already migrated to microservice architecture in Kubernetes  in the cloud.

From a recovery standpoint, InfoScale is excellent and easy to manage. A single technical person can handle 100 machines or one application spanning multiple clusters. I utilized the Virtual Business Services feature to design the solution, enabling all databases, frontend machines, backend machines, and related components to move to different clusters seamlessly without any issues.

InfoScale has significantly reduced downtime for my customer. I encountered unusual split-brain issues. Because I did not utilize all cluster features such as I/O Fencing, which requires additional setup and licensing cost, the solution was not designed with I/O Fencing. When split-brain occurred, I had to investigate the cause, protect the data, and determine remediation steps. For data protection, I implemented SCSI-3 Persistent Reserve at the storage level instead of using I/O Fencing.

What I value most about InfoScale is its ease of use and clear visibility into environment operations, particularly in large environments. I set up Veritas Operation Manager, which interacts with all clusters and provides a central management location for the entire clustering environment. The Cluster Manager graphical interface tool is excellent for identifying problems easily. The solution is robust and rarely causes issues. When cluster problems arise, I can identify that the actual problem exists elsewhere, with Veritas alerting me that external factors are affecting cluster behavior. This makes identifying root causes straightforward in a solid environment.

Comparing InfoScale to HACMP (now called PowerHA by IBM), InfoScale is significantly easier. Before 2010 and 2011, my customer used PowerHA before transitioning to InfoScale. We started with version 5 and progressed to version 7.3. The last running instances are version 7.2 or 7.3. We had strong confidence in the product, and architects were very satisfied with its performance matching our requirements exactly. Pricing is the only issue, as the customer cannot justify additional investment and is phasing out instances in favor of custom solutions.

I have used the application-aware failover feature. The environment runs very few single-node systems with application HA, which continue to function but are not actively used. The customer is working to remove applications from Veritas control. This feature remains intact and operational but has no upgrade or evolution plans.

Regarding layering dependencies across web, application, and data tiers, I worked with the Virtual Business Service feature within Veritas Operation Manager. I created Virtual Business Services with dependencies for frontend web servers, databases such as DB2  or Oracle, and defined startup sequences where the database starts first, followed by frontend services only after the database is live and running. This layering system was quite helpful, requiring only a single click to trigger the entire process, leaving Veritas to manage everything automatically.

Beyond pricing, there are areas where I would like to see InfoScale improved or enhanced. Veritas offers three management approaches. The first, which Veritas currently recommends, is Veritas Operation Manager. The second is the Cluster Manager Java Console graphical interface. The Cluster Manager Java Console has not been revised since version 6.1 or 6.2. This tool was critical for me, particularly valuable when managing small cluster footprints of 20 to 30 server nodes. I relied heavily on this tool, but Veritas has moved away from it in favor of Operation Manager. I recommend Veritas continue evolving this tool rather than discarding it. The third approach is the command line, suitable for individuals with extensive Veritas expertise and experience, but command line use in live environments consumed excessive time, leading me to prefer the graphical interface.

Apart from pricing, I have not discovered disadvantages. The product is excellent. My concern is Veritas discarding the Cluster Manager Java Console in favor of Veritas Operation Manager. Setting up Operation Manager requires time and a dedicated server that runs continuously. I had to create a single server just for Veritas Operation Manager. While this works well for larger environments with hundreds of clusters, it is less useful for smaller deployments. I still recommend Veritas reconsider this application and evolve it by incorporating new features from Veritas Operation Manager. Adding these new features to the Java console would be beneficial because that tool runs on my laptop without consuming environment resources, and I can connect directly to clusters from my laptop. I am not opposing Veritas Operation Manager, which is excellent and resembles hardware management consoles for power machines, but smaller tools that previously performed these tasks should remain as options to provide clients with greater ease.

From a features and functionality perspective, I do not find missing features in InfoScale at this moment. However, I am not actively using Veritas, managing only legacy machines on older hardware. I am upgrading operating systems but not Veritas due to contract expiration and end-of-life status. The contract is not being renewed because the customer wants to move away. Since I have not logged into VCS  since 2021 and transferred responsibilities to another team, I am unaware of features arriving in version 8 or beyond and cannot comment specifically on recent Veritas introductions.

I have used InfoScale for about eight years.

Regarding stability and scalability, I have not experienced performance issues or limitations. Adding nodes is straightforward. The maximum cluster I managed ran five nodes, and scaling to six nodes was easy. I created a machine, deployed Veritas guidelines, joined it to the cluster membership, and continued from there. Management through the graphical interface or command line is straightforward. Veritas supports a maximum of 32 nodes, though I never exhausted that capacity.

When I encounter situations I cannot resolve or understand, or when incidents require vendor input or investigation, I contact Veritas customer service. I raise tickets, and they participate in root cause analysis and incident fixes. This interaction is limited because the product is stable and robust, rarely causing problems. Once the Veritas InfoScale contract expired, my customer designed alternative solutions outside InfoScale. They began phasing out and decommissioning InfoScale environments, reducing from 500 cluster nodes to approximately 50 nodes. Product interaction with the support team is now very limited.

The Cluster Manager graphical interface was excellent for identifying problems easily. The solution was robust and rarely caused issues. When cluster problems arose, I identified that the actual problem existed elsewhere, with Veritas alerting me that external factors affected cluster behavior, making root cause identification straightforward in a solid environment. HACMP, now called PowerHA and developed by IBM, is significantly harder. In my early environment before 2010 and 2011, my customer used PowerHA before transitioning to InfoScale. We started with version 5 and progressed to version 7.3.

Comparing InfoScale to other clustering products, the heartbeat implementation stands out. HACMP does not run a heartbeat; they now have a setup running heartbeat on disk. In VCS, I maintained three different types of heartbeats. If one failed, another remained active. When the second failed, the third provided redundancy. Another excellent Veritas feature is the ability to freeze applications or service groups. Whenever maintenance was scheduled or for other reasons, I could freeze them. This option does not exist in any other solution, making it outstanding. The freeze option is exceptional in Veritas.

I was involved in the deployment process and initial setup of InfoScale. We designed the solution, not only myself but also an architect. My role as an SRE involves running the service and maintaining uptime rather than participating in design and solutioning. In the initial days, I set up cluster servers from scratch, installing all LPARs on AIX and configuring storage, then loading Veritas. One important Veritas feature I should mention is that it has maintained hybrid solutions since 2006 or 2007. Veritas can run two different cluster nodes with two different operating systems, such as one Windows node and one Linux node. This feature does not exist in any other solution and is impossible elsewhere. Veritas offers this capability, which I appreciate. I never utilized this feature, but its availability demonstrates Veritas' comprehensive approach.

Comparing InfoScale to other clustering products I have worked with, the heartbeat implementation is distinctive. HACMP does not run a heartbeat; their current setup runs heartbeat on disk. In VCS, I maintained three different types of heartbeats, providing redundancy if one failed. Another excellent Veritas feature is the ability to freeze applications or service groups. Whenever maintenance approached or for other reasons, I could freeze them. This option does not exist in any other solution, making it exceptional. The freeze option is outstanding in Veritas.

I recommend InfoScale to others based on my extensive experience. Previously, when advising another customer interested in IBM solutions such as PowerHA and HACMP who had purchased an IBM solution, I suggested they select Veritas instead. Despite being an IBM employee at that time, I recommended they not purchase PowerHA and proceed with Veritas. They discussed my explanation and decided to trust my assessment, reasoning that managing two different systems would be complicated and that my comfort with Veritas made it the better choice.