SteelEye Insider

LifeKeeper for Windows v6 Update 1 Maintenance Release

Today, we released the following LifeKeeper and SteelEye Data Replication for Windows products:

• LifeKeeper for Windows v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2

• LifeKeeper Oracle Recovery Kit v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2
• LifeKeeper SAP Recovery Kit v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2
• LifeKeeper Microsoft SQL Server Recovery Kit v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2
• LifeKeeper VMware VirtualCenter Recovery Kit v6 Update 1 Maintenance 1

• SteelEye Data Replication for Windows v6 Update 1 Maintenance 3

• LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Windows v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2
• LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Microsoft Exchange v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2
• LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Microsoft SQL v6 Update 1 Maintenance 2

Included are changes made to support the following new features:

• LifeKeeper GUI Enhancements
• LifeKeeper License Key Manager  Enhancements
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) support
• Configuring Generic Application Scripts
• Usability enhancements for Oracle, SAP, SQL, and VMware VC Recovery Kits

Details on the product updates are available here.

Customers with an annual support agreement may contact SteelEye Support (support@steeleye.com) to download desired product updates.

Oracle Enterprise Linux and CentOS Support

A major feature of our most recent Linux release is support for LifeKeeper and SteelEye Data Replication with Oracle Enterprise Linux and CentOS.  This marks something of a departure for SteelEye as historically we have limited support to Red Hat and SLES.   Increasingly, however, we are seeing our customers wanting choice in the Linux distro that they deploy. 

As Oracle stated in the press release announcing our support for OEL, the partnership between our companies goes back a long way:

SteelEye's support for Oracle Enterprise Linux is a natural step in the evolution of the companies' long-standing relationship. With the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program gaining favor among data center administrators, having the ability to provide the data and application protection provided by SteelEye is very important for our joint customers.

As a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, we have provided monitoring and protection for Oracle solutions since 2001and our Oracle Protection Suite remains one of our best selling products. We're pleased to also now support OEL.

Replicate, Rewind and Recover: CDP for Linux

Today, we announced the immediate availability of SteelEye Data Replication for Linux v6 update 2.  This new release adds several features to help our customers provide advanced protection for their business-critical data. 

Any Point in Time
“Any Point in Time Rewind” is a vital CDP element that rewinds data back in time to any moment before data loss occurred. In minutes, data can be restored and business is back to normal. Adding such capabilities to an already robust data replication solution, SteelEye Data Replication also provides organizations with a CDP option that enhances protection of more than one backup of critical business data, whether on-site or remote.  Immediately upon noticing data integrity issues, users can mount the replicated data on a backup volume and then move backward and forward through the data stream via time stamps or other user-defined bookmarks until the optimal set of data is constructed.  That data are then placed into service and normal operations resume.

Integrated Data Recovery Wizard
The process of managing data recovery is handled through a built-in Data Recovery Wizard.  This simple-to-use tool guides users through the building of a new temporary dataset. It validates the dataset for consistency via appropriate tools and then loops back through these steps as needed until the optimal dataset is built. An intelligent binary search technique speeds the rebuilding process to optimize recovery time.  Once completed, the wizard places the dataset back into service, onto the production server, and resumes normal business operations.

Multiple Replication Targets
For companies who need the enhanced protection of more than one real-time backup of critical business data, SteelEye Data Replication supports multiple replication targets, which can span any combination of local and remote sites. Local data recovery is assured by continuous backup within the local data center, while asynchronous remote data replication protects against nearby disasters.

Visit here for more information on SteelEye Data Replication for Linux.

LifeKeeper for Linux v6 u2 adds OEL and CentOS support

We are pleased to announce the immediate general availability (GA) of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Update 2.  LifeKeeper for Linux v6 Update 2 includes any maintenance release changes made to v6 U1 and the following new features:

·         Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 9 on x86, AMD64/EM64T, and pSeries

·         Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 5 on x86, AMD64/EM64T, and IBM POWER

·         Support for SLES 10 SP1 on x86, AMD64/EM64T, and IBM POWER

·         Support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 Update 5 on x86 and x86_64

·         Support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 on x86 and x86_64

·         Support for The Community ENTerprise Operating System (CentOS) 4.0 Update 5 on x86 and x86_64

·         Support for The Community ENTerprise Operating System (CentOS) 5.0 on x86 and x86_64

·         GUI updated to include new view menu items, wizard usability improvements and general maintenance

·         DRBD Recovery Kit

·         Support for DRBD 0.8

·         Support for N+1 configurations

·         General Maintenance for the following kits:

·         PowerPath Recovery Kit

·         DRBD Recovery Kit

·         Sendmail Recovery Kit

Refer to the Release Notes for more details on the support for these new features.

SIOS Technical Expert Wins “2007 Japan OSS Contributors Awards”

SteelEye is very pleased to announce that Yoshinori Sato  of our parent company, SIOS Technology, has won the "2007 Japan OSS Contributor's Awards"judged by the Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA).

The prize is awarded by the IPA every year to the top open source software (OSS) developer.

Yoshinori has been recognized for “His contributions to OSS, including the porting of Linux to CPUs targeted at embedded applications.”

Congratulations, Yoshinori.

I Want One of Those!

Our UK reseller, Open Minds, has published a great customer story on a LifeKeeper implementation at E-retailer, I Want One of Those.  From the story:

The LifeKeeper business continuity software has increased IT department productivity in general as well as safeguarding ERP server availability. Sagar explains that they operate in three modes: the production environment; a test environment and a QA mode: "We are continually developing the system. Now we can make a deployment to a live system during business hours if needed. We would have to have done this out of hours before. Now we don't have to worry so much. From October onwards we will have to stop development but we now have the means to deploy to the inactive node and test out system changes. It certainly helps us in the testing process."

Sagar is delighted with SteelEye LifeKeeper: "LifeKeeper has made life so much easier. Developing with Linux is hard at the best of times. LifeKeeper made it better. It's just absolutely brilliant and makes my team’s life easier."

Read the full story here.

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.

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.