SteelEye Insider

Storage Magazine Selects SteelEye Data Replication

  We are very excited that Storage Magazine, the leading publication on data management, has named SteelEye Data Replication for Windows v6 as a finalist for Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Software of 2007.  You can see the other finalists and more details here. 

  SteelEye Data Replication for Windows v6 is the first data protection product to offer both host-based volume replication and Continuous Data Protection.  It supports multiple targets, nine levels of compression and a built-in data recovery wizard which helps administrators roll data back to any previous point in time.

  Congratulations to the SteelEye engineering team for building a product worthy of recognition by a leading industry publication!

SteelEye Protection for VMware Infrastructure

Chris Wolf, blogger for searchservervirtualization.com laments the fact that the SteelEye Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure was not included among the winners in the 2007 Products of the Year. 

Yeah, we agree with Chris!

Clustering or Virtual Machine Replication?

In his blog, Virtually Speaking, Dan Kusnetzky (The Virtual Man) writes a great review of whether it is better to "deploy a clustered solution, such as SteelEye’s LifeKeeper or encapsulate applications and use a virtual machine replication technology, such as VMware’s Vmotion, XenSource’s Xenmotion or Virtual Iron’s Virtual Iron, to accomplish something" similar. 

Dan's posting covers critical goals of such a deployment including higher performance, increased scalability, increased availability, increased agility, and everything else.   It's a read that I highly recommend.

SteelEye Wins Best Clustering Solution at LinuxWorld !!

We Won!

The LifeKeeper Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3 was recognized today as Best Clustering Solution at LinuxWorld.  See the press release at:  LinuxWorld.com and IDG World Expo Announce Product Excellence Award Winners at LinuxWorld and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo.

We are very appreciative of this industry recognition of SteelEye’s continued leadership in providing solutions that companies rely on to ensure the availability of their critical applications and data.

SteelEye an acquisition target?

This recent article from The 451 Group includes SteelEye among Virtualization Management vendors (yeah!) who might be seen as an acquisition target (?) by the bigger players in the space. 

That was followed up by this blog posting along the same lines.

Sorry, we cannot comment on M&A rumors.  :)

James talks with Redmond Channel Partner

A great interview with James discussing Microsoft’s assertions around GPLv3.  An excerpt is below:

James Bottomley is really on top of things (sorry -- we had to say it) when it comes to Linux. The CTO of SteelEye Technology is also on the board of the Linux Foundation. In that capacity, he helps smooth the transition of disparate Linux organizations into the still fairly new Foundation.

As such, Bottomley's obviously got some insight into Microsoft's continued patent deals with Linux distributors.

Those patent deals took another turn this week as Redmond claimed that its deal with Linspire didn't cover software developed under the latest version of the license that governs Linux use, the now infamous GPLv3.

Bottomley is an open source believer, but while he's, let's just say, "critical" of Redmond's business practices, it's important to point out that he's not necessarily anti-Microsoft. (SteelEye, in fact, is a Gold Certified Partner.) And his perspective on Microsoft's fleecing of Linux distributors is not only that it isn't really fleecing at all -- but that it might just end up being a huge waste of time and money.

LifeKeeper for Exchange Product Review

DM Review magazine has published a very positive product review and profile of the LifeKeeper for Exchange selection and deployment at U of Tampa.   What makes this particular customer story special for us is that LifeKeeper was selected after a very rigorous evaluation process against all of our main competitors.  LifeKeeper stood up to everything thrown at it while the other solutions corrupted mailstores and/or had to be reinstalled in order to continue working. 

An excerpt from the review reads:

What sold our team on Steeleye's LifeKeeper software was the ability to control failover every time. We were very concerned about day-to-day IT issues such as short-term power failures, DNS failures, network card failures, normal shutdowns for system maintenance, etc. During testing, the other products continuously tried to failover during these forced outages, often resulting in a corrupt email system. LifeKeeper only attempted to failover when we wanted it to.

Another reads:

SteelEye was the only product of the three we evaluated that did not corrupt our email system when we forced a typical "problem" situation, such as simulating a network outage or a power outage. SteelEye was also the only application that we didn't have to continuously reinstall whenever we tried to failover. Other products tended to failover even when we did not intend to do so. Another important factor in the decision process was the strength of the software vendor's support team. Any prospective solution without support staff in the U.S. was eliminated from consideration.

Go team!

SteelEye named among "10 Software Vendors to Watch" by CRN

SteelEye has been named by CRN Magazine as one of "10 Software Vendors to Watch"!  Go to www.steeleye.com and click on the right hand display to see the full slide show.

It feels grea to have the team's achievements recognized by industry peers and journalists.  We're a hard working company with some really fantastic technology and incredibly smart people.  We truly believe that our products can make the lives of lots of people much better and can make any company more productive.

Thanks for the recognition.

James speaks at Ottawa Linux Symposium

Our CTO, James Bottomley, delivered the keynote at Ottowa Linux Symposium last week on the topic "Evolution and Diversity: The Meaning of Openness and Freedom in Linux". 

Dave Jones has posted a few comments on his blog.

David Graham has posted a detailed account of the final day of OLS on linux.com.

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.