SteelEye Insider

LifeKeeper for Windows v5.3 now GA

SteelEye is pleased to announce the immediate general availability of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Windows v5.3, SteelEye Data Replication for Windows v5.3, LifeKeeper SAP Recovery Kit v5.3, LifeKeeper Oracle Recovery Kit v5.3, and LifeKeeper IBM Director Recovery Kit v5.3. 

Note that with this release we have changed the name for our data replication product to "SteelEye Data Replication for Windows".  This release includes the following features:

• SteelEye Data Replication for Windows v5.3
  • Data Compression
  • Silent Install Support
• LifeKeeper for Windows v5.3
  • Updated Unix Emulation Layer (Cygwin)
  • Updated Java version to 1.5.0-6
  • Roles Based GUI Support
  • Shortcuts for LifeKeeper GUI
  • GUI support added for setting the Compression Level for SteelEye Data Replication volumes
  • GUI support for managing DNS resources (user and password)
  • Allow Protection of Hidden File Shares
  • Silent Install Support
• LifeKeeper SAP Recovery Kit v5.3
  • Support for SAP JAVA environments
  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server
  • GUI support for managing SAP user password
• LifeKeeper Oracle Recovery Kit v5.3
  • GUI support for managing Oracle user and password
  • GUI support for managing list of optional protected services
• LifeKeeper IBM Director Recovery Kit v5.3
  • Support for IBM Director Server v5.10.2
  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server
  • Support for Oracle
  • GUI support for managing IBM Director user and password

Please refer to the LifeKeeper for Windows Release Notes, SteelEye Data Replication for Windows Release Notes, and the corresponding ARK Administration Guides for additional information.

LifeKeeper for Linux v6

Tpday we have released SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux v6 and SteelEye Data Replication v6.   The v6 release includes: 

• SteelEye Data Replication v6
  • Removes any need for kernel updates
  • Provides support for native bitmap and asynchronous write (write-behind) features of the md driver that are available in 2.6.16 and later kernels
  • Takes advantage of the native md/mdadm event infrastructure to make response time for disk and network failures much shorter (~5-10 seconds vs. 2 minutes)
  • Handles local disk failure by allowing user to either resync the local disk or perform a failover
  • Makes "New Replicated Filesystem" the default resource type, as it is the most commonly used
  • Provides additional disk support, i.e., i2o disks
  • More intuitive default tag name (plus the ability for the user to override the default tag name at create time)
  • Better debug capabilities
  • Miscellaneous new bug fixes and forward port of all LKDR 4.x bug fixes
  • Name change from LKDR
  • New GUI options allow for much simpler mirror management

• LifeKeeper for Linux Core v6 and ARKs
  • Support for SLES 10 – 2.6.16.21-0.8
  • Support for Java 1.5 (excluding POWER)
  • GUI Restart Option
  • DB2 ARK v5.2.0
    • Support for Viper (v9)
    • Database Partitioning Feature support
  • VMware
    • Support for running LifeKeeper in VMware ESX Server 3.0 virtual machines
  • Storage Certification with LK v5.2
    • DataCore SANsymphony – City of Mannheim
    • Xiotech - Banta
• General Maintenance for the following ARKs
  • SAMS v5.1.2
  • LVM v5.1.3
  • MQ v5.2.1 - Maintenance work to support MQ v6.0

Please refer to the LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Release Notes and the corresponding ARK Administration Guides for additional information.  In addition, there are two new Configuration Guideline documents for VMware ESX Server Virtual Machines and IBM POWER LPARs with LK on the website under the LifeKeeper for Linux v6 documentation link.

James to present at LinuxWorld

LinuxWorld is fast approaching.  Our CTO, James Bottomley, will be delivering two sessions which should prove to be educational as well as entertaining.

As part of the kernel track, James will present a session on Tuesday titled "The Roadmap for Linux Storage:  Or why we don't have one".

As part of the OSDL Kernel Sessions, James will turn his attention to "Why Open Source contributions can be an asset to your Company and how to make them effectively".

These sessions present a great opportunity for any SteelEye customers, partners, evaluators to come hear and meet a key member of the management team.  I am certain that James will welcome the chance to chat with you after his sessions about clustering, Linux kernel development, storage roadmaps, the subtleties of English tea varieties or any of the many other topics on which he is a self-professed expert :).

I'll post more later on our own booth at LW and the very neat demo that the team has put together.

IDC sees huge growth in disk-based backup

According to an IDC press release,  a just-published report titled "Disk-based Data Protection - 2006" finds that disk-based backup solutions will account for

$8 billion in user IT spending in 2006 and is poised to generate more than $50 billion in software and hardware purchases through 2010. This explosive growth is fueled by increasing regulatory compliance, business continuity, and fast recovery, the disk-based data protection market will continue to expand at a rate two to three times faster than the overall storage market.

We began to notice about three years ago that a set of our customers were taking our data replication products and using them outside of failover clusters.  These customers just wanted a faster, cheaper, more secure way to get a copy of their critical data onto a backup disk and had figured out that real-time replication was the best approach.  With network speeds increasing, replication engines getting more efficient and disk prices falling, this is a natural evolution of the backup process. 

Eventually, backup tapes will be obsolete.  All data protection will occur either:

• via CDP to a disk either within the local data center (perhaps a dedicated backup server) or across a WAN link (for full disaster recovery)
• via electronic vaulting using an online hosted service or in-house
• via virtual tape archiving

The economics of tape just don't make sense any longer.   The labelling, the rotating, the sequential searches..... those days are gone.

Protection for Virtual Servers

We don't do much print advertising in SteelEye since online tends to give us a greater return.  But, we're launching a new campaign around protection for virtual servers and felt like IBM's Linux Executive Report would be a good place for us to make our presence known.  So, we splurged for a full page, check it out.