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Support for Virtual Appliances

Virtual appliances are getting a lot of attention in the business continuity space. As defined by Wikipedia, a virtual appliance (VA) is a minimalist virtual machine image designed to run under some sort of virtualization technology (i.e. Citrix XenServer, VMWare Workstation, etc.). We offer two main benefits to VA users:

1) SteelEye solutions embedded in both Windows and Linux-based VAs address a growing concern for business continuity and disaster recovery being delivered as part of the VA.

2) Our DataKeeper and Protection Suite for XenServer products enable high-availability for VAs running on Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer platforms, respectively, even if HA and DR are not baked into the VA.

Additionally, these single-application VAs mesh nicely with our LifeKeeper product, which has always been differentiated by its deep application-level monitoring and application-centric clustering approach. We believe that customers will increasingly demand VA features (redundancy, replication, etc.) that have been standard for years on real appliances. SteelEye offers those solutions through direct integration with the VA and/or by protecting the VA as a whole at the hypervisor level.

Bob Williamson, SVP of Product Management

When Cloud Computing Becomes Fog Computing; Seeing Through the Shroud

Cloud computing is the most overused phrase since virtualization, according to VMWare's CTO, and it's easy to see why. Many people have begun referring to all types of data storage as cloud computing, shrouding the true meaning of the concept in fog.

At its core, cloud computing can be described as data storage services that are hosted remotely, and essentially rented. Amazon, Google and SalesForce.com are three of the most widely known cloud computing providers. Leveraging these cloud computing platforms and services offers many benefits -- such as reducing IT costs and enabling an increasingly mobile workforce -- but it can also greatly increase an organization's vulnerability to data loss and system failure.

Lending support to this assertion, the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association and The Security Consortium recently convened a meeting of over 60 IT and security leaders from companies such as Visa, Google and HP. The group unanimously stated that cloud computing increases the chances of data leakage.

These new vulnerabilities can compromise the availability of information, which poses tremendous new business continuity challenges. Any breach or network outage means that businesses built on this new infrastructure can be offline for hours at a time, endangering revenue collection as well as user trust.

To meet these new challenges, companies must explore business continuity solutions that can insulate the infrastructure and function equally well in physical and virtualized environments. They must adopt a mindset that anticipates challenges and implements the required processes to deploy best-in-class high availability and data replication functionality.

Greg Ewald, VP of Marketing