| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data integration Data protection Sorting Data manipulation |
| Headquarters | Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, USA |
| Number of locations | 5 |
| Products | SyncSort, DMExpress, BEX |
| Employees | 400 |
| Website | www.syncsort.com |
Syncsort Incorporated is a software company specializing in high speed sorting products, as well as data integration and backup software and services, for Windows, Unix, Linux, and mainframe systems. According to its website,[1] Syncsort products are used by over 90 of the Fortune 100 companies and can be found in over 12,000 customer sites worldwide. Syncsort is headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, United States. It has offices in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, with an international support center in The Netherlands. Syncsort customers operate in a range of industries, including manufacturing, consumer goods, transportation, local and federal governments, and health care.[2]
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Syncsort began as a mainframe company in 1968 as Whitlow Computer Systems, founded by Duane Whitlow and Stan Rintell [3], then renamed itself in 1981 to its flagship product (SyncSort, Inc.). [4] In the nineties, Syncsort expanded into client–server environments, offering a sort utility for UNIX and later Linux, and a backup product for heterogeneous environments called Backup Express(now known as BEX). In 2004, SyncSort for UNIX evolved into a data management product called DMExpress.[5] In recent years, Syncsort has received several readership awards from DMReview magazine.[4][6][7]
Syncsort products are designed to back up and recover data rapidly in distributed, heterogeneous environments; to speed data warehouse processing, database loads, and query performance, and to handle mainframe sorting and data transformation jobs. Syncsort offers its solutions through three sets of products: SyncSort, DMExpress, and Backup Express (now known as BEX).
The original SyncSort sorting utility was developed in the late 1960s and was designed to speed batch processing on mainframes. In his book Mainframe High Productivity Tools of the 90s, computing expert Alex Varsegi defined SyncSort’s capabilities.
From the user’s perspective, SyncSort essentially replaces a number of utility and program functions (for example, compiling, debugging, testing, and linking programs, as well as selecting, reformatting, converting, and summarizing the various record types).[8]
The current incarnation, SyncSort for z/OS, is a sort/merge/copy and data management utility designed to take advantage of the capabilities of the IBM zSeries computers and the z/OS operating system's advanced facilities, including the IBM MIDAW and System z9 Integrated Information Processors (zIIP). SyncSort for z/OS also supports S/390, the OS/390 operating system, and compatible computers.[9] A similar product, SyncSort VSE, is designed for IBM z/VSE and VSE/ESA operating systems.
The data sorting and transformation capabilities described by Varsegi for mainframe systems are provided as well in DMExpress, Syncsort's data integration product for UNIX, Windows, and Linux. DMExpress is typically used for ETL, data warehousing, and business intelligence applications.[10] The program is designed to transform and consolidate data from multiple sources. On November 14, 2008, DMExpress set a world record for ETL performance by extracting, transforming, cleansing, and loading 5.4 TB of data into a Vertica Analytic Database on a c-Class HP BladeSystem in 57 minutes.[11][12] Microsoft and Unisys set the previous ETL world record at 2.36 TB/hr in early 2008.[13] System administrators and analysts often use DMExpress to pre-process data to speed database loads, to create and maintain aggregate data stores[14] from flat files, to optimize reporting,[15] and for changed data capture (CDC) applications.[16] Data warehouse expert, Dr. Ralph Kimball in the first edition of his popular book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, explained how data management and sorting products like Syncsort’s can be valuable for Database Management Systems (DBMSs):
[The] massive sorting and summarizing operations required to build aggregates can be handled much more efficiently with a dedicated sorting package like SyncSort on either IBM or a UNIX machine than by using the sorting capabilities of the relational DBMS.[17]
Backup Express or BEX is used for data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity. It integrates snapshot, image and rapid recovery options, works across Fibre Channel or iSCSI networks while sharing system drives, and supports NDMP incrementals.[18] Utilizing D2D techniques, including block-level incremental backups and image-based storage, Backup Express offers recovery in place, server re-imaging, and thin cloning capabilities.[19]