DST Announces High AvailabilityTechnology Partnership

Mission Viejo, CA…April 9, 2007 ...DST Inc., an IBM® Optimized Business Partner and leading provider of end-to-end parts supply chain solutions, has announced the formation of a technology partnership with Vision Solutions, IBM’s largest high availability Premier Business Partner, with the objective of providing the best possible protection of applications and information for customers using the IBM System i platform.

Vision Solutions markets its high availability (HA) products under the iTera brand. The company’s innovative technology solutions have removed barriers to entry for ease of use, management, and implementation. There are two products, named iTera Echo ² and iTera Vault, both providing powerful solutions for disaster recovery, backups, and saves.

iTera Echo ² is a comprehensive solution, providing the most efficient means of mitigating planned and unplanned downtime events, by designating a second System i as the backup system, then implementing programs that replicate all changes to critical information on the production system to the backup. If a failure or system maintenance event occurs, users are moved to the second “mirror image” system to resume business operations without loss of data.

iTera Vault is a baseline solution for establishing an automated backup and recovery system which meets the needs of a more cost conscious organization by not requiring a second System i, but by eliminating the need for doing tape backups on a company’s production system. It efficiently offloads object backups and saves to a local system, remote platform, or a central data center chosen by the customer.

With these solutions, a business can recover quickly from a disaster without loss of data since daily transactions, changed objects, and saves are automatically sent to an alternate system and protected near real-time. A business is also empowered to do daily backups and saves without operational downtime and recover lost data in the event it is inadvertently cleared or corrupted.

Lou Stover, VP of Marketing for DST said, “Users of comprehensive business systems, especially in a world where e-commerce has the capability of generating revenue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, realize their successful business operations are highly driven by the on-demand availability of the information and data they contain. Disruptions caused by natural and manmade catastrophes, both of which we have seen in recent years, as well as planned downtime for backups or system maintenance, can have a devastating and perhaps permanent effect on a warehouse distributor’s ability to conduct business. For many companies, exposure to potential downtime has become unacceptable. The high availability solutions provided by Vision Solutions are the answer to this need.”

Larry Thompson, ISV Sales Executive for Vision Solutions said, “DST customers have consistently exemplified how visionary management teamed with best of breed technology can propel the business plan of a warehouse distributor to first achieve and then exceed business goals. Our technology partnership with DST provides the answer to a critical need for System i users by ensuring continued business operational excellence in the event of planned or unplanned disruptions.”