Catalogic Software Inc. has added application-aware support for InterSystems Corp’s Caché and SAP SE’s HANA databases, and extended Microsoft SQL Server support to physical hosts in a new release of its ECX copy data management software

Support for Caché effectively extends ECX support to Epic Systems Corp.’s electronic health records system, which is used by more than half of U.S. healthcare providers.

Version 2.6 of Catalogic’s software also expands in-place database virtualization technology, which the company said dramatically reduces the time and effort required to deliver secure copies of data. Catalogic says its platform can reduce enterprise storage costs by an average of 20 percent to 40 percent by automating copy management using snapshot and replication technologies of existing storage and virtual infrastructure rather than dedicated equipment.

“It’s a control plane for data in a self-service portal,” said Chief Executive Ken Barth. “Many developers are interested in working on the same data that’s used in production. So if you’re in test team you can always get latest copy and automatically refresh on whatever schedule you choose. Then you can tie into your data masking tool so it becomes part of the workflow.”

The company addresses a costs and management problem created when organizations make multiple copies of each production database for purposes ranging from backup to analytics. Catalogic instead creates a single, shared copy that requires no additional infrastructure and keeps copy data on production systems, eliminating the need for dedicated devices and file systems.

The new release specifically adds support for SAP HANA running on Linux on x86 and IBM Power Systems, InterSystems Caché and Epic EHR software on Linux and IBM AIX  and SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 on physical servers. SQL Server was previously supported only in virtualized environments.

Catalogic has spent much of last year overhauling its abstraction layer to make it easier for customers to move data between storage arrays, Barth said. The company expects to expand platform support at a faster rate because of the new abstraction layer. “This makes it easy for us to plug in a new array,” Barth said. “All we have to do is use the array commands.”

The new version also has a refreshed user interface that he company says is friendlier to the application user. “We initially had a very storage-centric perspective,” Barth said, but last year’s alliance with Pure Storage Inc. changed some thinking. “Pure’s people are application-centric,”he said, “and increasingly it’s the app owners who are driving these decisions.”

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