SteelEye Insider

A Note from our new President, Garrett Gafke

Hello All,

I wanted to write a brief note introducing myself to everyone. First, I would like to thank Paul Adams for his outstanding service and leadership at SteelEye for the past five years. Paul and I have spent a good deal of time working on this transition to ensure that it would flow smoothly.

I feel very privileged and excited to be a part of the SteelEye team. SteelEye has such a fantastic history and bright future with such committed customers and partners. There are many exciting things in the works at SteelEye and I look forward to meeting our customers and partners in the near future to discuss them in detail.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions/concerns or just to say hi.  I very much look forward to working with all of you.

Garrett Gafke President
SteelEye Technology
ggafke@steeleye.com
D. 650-213-1480
C. 415-740-3825

Postfix Protection

Today, we released a new LifeKeeper Recovery Kit for Postfix on Linux.  From the Admin Guide:

Postfix plays a variety of roles, all critical to the proper flow of email. It listens on the network for incoming mail, transports mail messages to other servers, and delivers local mail to a local program.

The LifeKeeper for Linux Postfix Recovery Kit provides a mechanism to recover Postfix from a failed primary server to a backup server in a LifeKeeper environment. Both LifeKeeper and Postfix ensure data integrity throughout the course of the failover process without significant lost time or human intervention.

With protection now for both Sendmail and Postfix, Linux mail servers are ensured to be always available.

High Availability for Apps within Virtual Servers

In a review of VMworld announcements titled VMware dispels virtualization myths (sort of) , Bridget Botelho writes

Speaking at VMworld 2007, which took place Sept, 11-13 in San Francisco, VMware Inc. Product Marketing Manager Mark Chuang and Marketing Manager Steven Gross led a session titled "Dispelling Virtualization Myths," which tackled issues such as virtualization's readiness for production systems, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing policies and security.

Included withint the article is a quote from Chris Wolf of analyst firm, Burton Group:

from a reliability standpoint, running applications on a VM may be even more secure than running them on a dedicated physical machine. Applications that do not natively support clustering can fail over to another server as part of a virtual machine via VMware HA, and adding replication software such as that offered by SteelEyeTechnology Inc. makes the process even easier, since it can trigger failover based on application failures, Burton said.

The combination of application-level monitoring and server virtualization technology is very powerful.  Users realize all of the benefits of server consolidation, greater utilization computing resources and unique configurations only available in a virtualized environment (such 2 copies of Exchange server on the same box or a mixed Linux/Windows single server config) without sacrificing any availability for their apps and data. 

Welcome to Garrett Gafke as President and COO

SteelEye took the next step today in its growth with our announcement that Garrett Gafke has joined the company as President and COO.  Garrett brings great experience and enthusiasm to this new role and we look forward to accelerated expansion in all aspects of our business under his leadership. 

Welcome to SteelEye, Garrett.

VMworld Updates

Bloggers are catching up on their VMworld coverage.  SteelEye gets two mentions in the blogs below.  For any of you who want to stay current with Virtualization happenings, Alessandro Perilli’s Virtualization.info is a great resource.

SteelEye joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program
By Alessandro Perilli(Alessandro Perilli)
SteelEye Technology, a leading provider of data replication and application monitoring solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows, announced today at VMworld 2007 that it has joined the VMware ...
virtualization.info - http://www.virtualization.info/home.html

VMworld 2007 - What you may have missed
By Chris Wolf
Several vendors have stepped up to fill the void of failover in response to application or OS failure, and the following companies in the HA space made considerable noise at VMworld: SteelEye, Marathon Technologies, Scalent Systems, ...
Data Center Strategies - http://dcsblog.burtongroup.com/data_center_strategies/

Windows IT Pro coverage

Lavon Peters covers the recent SteelEye Data Replication for Windows version 6 release in the article, Clustering Plus Data Replication Equals Disaster Recovery. 

An excerpt:

SteelEye Data Replication for Windows 6.0, which is available as part of the LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Windows Server, includes new features such as any-point-in-time rewind, a built-in data recovery wizard, and the ability to replicate to multiple targets simultaneously. These new features use CDP to provide disaster recovery.

The any-point-in-time rewind feature lets an administrator access a backup and move forward or backward through the replicated data stream, using timestamps or another defined bookmark, to any point in time. This feature gives administrators the ability of finding the optimal time from which to restore data to put back into production. The data recovery wizard is a guide that walks you through the process of building a temporary data set and validating that data set, then automatically moving the data set onto the production server and bringing up the applications necessary for normal operations to resume. This wizard recognizes dependencies between data volumes--so if, for example, you need to restore a volume that houses your Microsoft Exchange mail stores, the wizard automatically evaluates the corresponding volume that holds your Exchange log files to also restore it from a point in time that ensures consistency between the two volumes. Another new feature supports multiple simultaneous targets for replication. Thus, you can back up a production server to another server on the LAN, for quick recovery, as well as to another server or multiple servers across the WAN, for disaster recovery purposes.

SIOS sponsors LifeKeeper Business Partner Conference

SteelEye parent, SIOS Technology, hosted 111 particants in Tokyo today for the LifeKeeper Business Partner Conference 2007.  Below are a couple of pictures from the event.

SIOS President Nobuo Kita welcomes business partners.

Many partners attended to hear about LifeKeeper product updates and to share success stories.

   

SteelEye at VMworld

We are at VMWORLD 2007 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco this week.    In conjunction with the show, this morning we announced that SteelEye has joned the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program.

Visit us in booth 1209 to see how VMware Infrastructure 3 can be fully protected for both local failovers and wide-area disaster recovery using SteelEye LifeKeeper. We'll also demonstrate the industry's only solution for clustering Virtual Center Management Server.