Steeleye Announces Protection Suite for Windows Server

Data and application availability management specialist Steeleye Technology announced the latest version of their SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows Server, a combined high availability and disaster recovery solution for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Integrating data replication and high availability clustering software from SteelEye DataKeeper and LifeKeeper solutions, the product suite delivers a high level of protection for applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle and others.

Features such as automatic failover eliminate single points of failure and maintains geographically dispersed clusters and hybrid high-availability/disaster recovery configurations, enabling automatic recovery of the protected application in the event of an application failure or other disaster, while synchronous and asynchronous replication ensures servers are in full-synch at all times. An any point-in-time rewind capability enables application recovery from data loss or corruption by rewinding data to the point-in-time prior to the corruption event, providing a recovery point objective (RPO) within mere seconds.

"Business continuity planning remains a top priority for enterprises to avoid potentially devastating economic consequences of IT downtime," said Bob Williamson, executive vice president of product management for SteelEye. "To help organizations address these challenges, SPS for Windows Server provides a flexible, application-centric approach to protect organizations' business critical applications and systems without weighing down existing IT resources or staff."

Jean S. Bozman, research vice president for IDC's enterprise platforms group, said all enterprises today, regardless of size, need to implement a form of business continuity assurance to mitigate the risk resulting from planned and unplanned downtime. "With SPS for Windows Server, SteelEye delivers an automated high availability and disaster recovery solution, combining high availability and replication software, that can be rapidly deployed, with ease of use, supporting business continuity priorities for a wide range of SMBs and large companies,” Bozman said.

Other features include controlled switchover, which reduces planned downtime associated with hardware updated, application updates and OS updates with cascading failover using replication to one or more target servers to enable a controlled switchover in the event of a manual recovery. In addition to the pre-packaged application support, SteelEye provides LifeKeeper Extender, which allows users, OEMs and ISVs to build their own application recovery kits to protect any application.

"Windows Server 2008 was built to deliver new capabilities, virtualization technologies, security enhancements and web capabilities which provide a solid foundation for growing business infrastructures," said Microsoft’s group product manager Ward Ralston. "SteelEye's new Protection Suite extends the capabilities of Windows Server 2008 by enhancing the availability of key data and delivering application protection services."