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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.

SIOS and SteelEye Experts Present at Tech Events

Yoshinori Sato, a Linux kernel engineer and maintainer employed by our parent company SIOS Technology, will present at FOSDEM on the port of the 2.6 Linux kernel to the SH-2(A) processor.  More about Sato-san's presentation is here.

SteelEye CTO James Bottomley will conduct a session titled  "Achieving High Availability and Data Protection with Linux" at Novell BrainShare where SteelEye is a gold sponsor.

If you are attending either of these events, please attend these sessions to see the SIOS/SteelEye experts in action.

LifeKeeper for Exchange Updated

LifeKeeper for Exchange has been updated to version 5.3 with a new release today.

The major features of the v5.3 release are:

• automation of the updating of routing groups and connectors
• a new option has also been added to automate the update of the public folder replica list on failover for Exchange 2003
• LifeKeeper GUI support has  been added for modifying the list of optional services protected by an Exchange resource and for changing the Exchange administrator/password used by the Exchange resource

More details are available in the Administrator's Guide.

Any existing customer who has an active maintenance contract can upgrade to this new version for no cost.

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.

Business Continuity Report

A Business Continuity Report was published by The Times (London) as a special supplement on July 26th. Among articles in this version of the report are:

• What is Business Continuity Management?
• What is Risk Management?
• Anatomy of a Disaster
• Ask the panel of business continuity experts

You can download a condensed version here.

US Cities not ready for disaster

A story in today's USA Today documents the results of a recent survey of 183 cities which found that:

eight in 10 cities say their emergency responders still can't communicate with each other or area towns, 44% have not created or updated their evacuation plans, and nearly three-quarters say they're not prepared to handle a flu pandemic outbreak

With hurricane season about to move into its most active period, those of us along the eastern coast (I am writing this from Charleston, SC) would like to believe that lessons learned from last year's catastrophes would have led to concrete substantive action.  Apparently, this is not the case. 

These government findings are in contrast to those of our own survey of corporate BC plans which found that on the whole corporations do have solid plans in place and do test and update them will regularity.  In fact, we found that 45% of those companies who have plans have actually invoked them.  If you would like a copy of the full survye results, send me an email at bobw@steeleye.com