SteelEye Insider

The Importance of VMware High Availability

June 28, 2007

Jason Bovberg of Windows IT Pro has posted an “Industry Bytes” story which mentions both SteelEye Protection Suite for VMWare Infrastructure 3 and LifeKeeper for Exchange.   See article below:

The Importance of VMware High Availability

A Web Exclusive from Windows IT Pro
Jason Bovberg
Industry Bytes
InstantDoc #96437
Windows IT Pro

I recently had an interesting chat with Bob Williamson, VP of product marketing and management at SteelEye Technology, about his company's new SteelEye Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3, built on technology that supports clustering physical and virtual servers for high availability, continuous data protection, and disaster recovery. "VMware would like you to believe that you have high availability just by incorporating virtualization, but that's simply not the case," Williamson said. "Virtualization actually increases the potential for downtime."

If you're using VMware to take advantage of the cost and management benefits of server consolidation, ensuring availability of the virtualized environment is critical. The SteelEye Protection Suite gives you a complete solution to protect all components of VMware Infrastructure 3, and the suite complements VMware's high-availability technologies (VMware HA) by delivering advanced data replication and high availability clustering technologies to monitor and automatically recover any piece of the VMware environment.

Whereas VMware HA protects virtual machines (VMs) from hardware failure, SteelEye LifeKeeper provides protection against OS and application failures within the VM. LifeKeeper monitors applications and all their dependencies, including file systems, device drivers, IP addresses and data connections, to ensure that any failure is automatically detected and recovered. Recovery can include restarting the application within the same VM, migrating the application to a VM on the same server, migrating it to a VM on a different server, or performing failover to a physical server.

A primary application in Windows is Exchange Server, the most critical back-office application that companies need to protect. SteelEye's solution is particularly appropriate for Exchange disaster recovery. "The Exchange solution supports active-passive clustering, cascading failover, shared-storage clustering combination with replication--the best variety of clustering solutions available," Williamson said.

SteelEye Releases LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Update 1 #2

Today we released  SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Update 1 Maintenance Update #2.  This maintenance update of v6 Update 1 includes: 

• LK Core – general maintenance

·     DMMP Kit – ability to support LVM on DMMP partitions

·      MD Kit – resolved issue with cable pulls not resulting in a switchover

·      MySQL Kit – support for invalid/modified passwords 

Please refer to the LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Update 1 Release Notes for additional information.

New Channel Partner Program (by Bonni-Jo Salazar)

Today we launched the official Reseller Partner Program in North America.   We’re very excited about the program because it will help us aggressively recruit and sign up additional resellers which will mean more feet on the street selling our solutions. 

It became clear to us that in order to grow our business and meet the demands for our product that the best way to do this would be to recruit additional resellers and provide more tools and incentives for the current resellers.  The Reseller Partner Program will include a partner portal, sales incentives, lead referrals, marketing campaign support, and training.

We’ll be attending various events over the course of the next few months to look for the most ideal Resellers to sell our solutions.   The first event will be the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver in July, followed by IBM’s System x and BladeCenter Conference in Las Vegas.  Next is Linuxworld and VMworld in San Francisco.  We plan to hit all the major events in order to recruit the best partners.  If you'll be attending one of these events and would like to talk to us about becoming a reseller, please stop by our booths.

You can read more about the new program at http://www.steeleye.com/partners/reseller_main.html

Another View from the Linux Foundation Summit

Scott Fulton of BetaNews has written a less sensational account of the mood at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. 

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

Our CTO, James Bottomley, is attending and speaking at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at Google's headquarters this week.  James represents the development comnunity on The Linux Foundation board and is quite vocal in his views on the future of Linux. 

You can read more about the first day of the summit here, here and here.