U.S. Army specifies Quest Software's database replication product for its Army Knowledge Online-AKO-program.

Quest Software Inc. (Nasdaq:QSFT), a provider of application management solutions, has announced the U.S. Army's selection of its SharePlex product for the U.S. Army's knowledge portal, Army Knowledge Online (AKO). The selection resulted in a $2.6 million contract award from the Army's subcontractor, Northrop Grumman.

On a user-basis, AKO is one of the largest portals of its kind in the world. Currently, more than 1.4 million Army accounts are registered on AKO. According to Col. Timothy Fong, director of chief technology office, NETCOM, "AKO is the Army's enterprise portal. It is the single point of entry for soldiers, retirees or civilians needing to handle a myriad of operational, procedural and personal information matters, from administrative tasks, online education and training, to checking benefits."

With respect to the technology solution, Fong added, "Database integrity and replication at a remote disaster recovery site are critical to the success of this platform. SharePlex is the only Oracle database replication solution that fully meets the requirements for AKO backup and recovery."

The SharePlex product was originally selected by the U.S. Army for disaster recovery concerns after 9/11 because of its ability to minimize mean time for database recovery, its minimal requirements for bandwidth and its ability to replicate the Army's Oracle database. SharePlex will provide real time replication of the Army's portal databases between Fort Belvoir and a remote disaster recovery site.

"It is more important than ever that our armed forces are ensured 24x7 access to their families, services information, and other warfighters," stated Paul Garver, vice president of Public Sector Sales. "Our product's ability to ensure 99.999% availability and synchronized, simultaneous access by the Army personnel is unmatched in the industry."

Quest Software is a provider of application management solutions. Quest provides customers with Application Confidence(SM) by delivering reliable software products to develop, deploy, manage and maintain enterprise applications without expensive downtime or business interruption.

Targeting high availability, monitoring, database management and Microsoft infrastructure management, Quest products increase the performance and uptime of business-critical applications and enable IT professionals to achieve more with fewer resources.