SteelEye Insider

Mission-Critical Applications at Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre Now Protected by SteelEye

2009-10-12T09:28:32-07:00

SteelEye is working to ensure the continuous availability of the online ticketing system at one of the busiest theatres in the U.K. SteelEye announced today the implementation of its LifeKeeper for Linux at Birmingham Hippodrome, home to the Birmingham Royal Ballet and other live performances.

With LifeKeeper on Birmingham Hippodrome servers, the theatre can rest assured its employees have uninterrupted access to business critical applications, which includes its online ticketing system. The ticketing system meets the needs of annual audiences of 500,000. Unplanned down time can prove costly for Birmingham Hippodrome. A single day of server downtime costs an estimated £20,000. By ensuring the continuous availability of the theatre’s mission-critical applications, SteelEye has enabled the theatre to realign IT resources to focus on new marketing initiatives through its website.

To learn more about how SteelEye assures the continuous availability of mission-critical applications at one of the busiest theatres in the U.K,. please visit: our news room.

SteelEye Helps Alstom Transport Ensure Business Continuity for Beijing Metro

2009-09-21T06:58:39-07:00

SteelEye today announced Alstom Transport’s deployment of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux to protect mission-critical applications of the maintenance system services for Beijing’s Metro. The implementation ensures train safety and optimized traffic operations while providing system maintenance across Beijing’s most critical rail line.

To learn more about how SteelEye assures business continuity by safeguarding maintenance system services for the busiest metro line in mainland China, please visit: our news room.

SteelEye Kicks off New Serviceguard for Linux Migration Program

2009-09-14T10:01:57-07:00

With HP’s recent announcement regarding the discontinuation of future sales of Serviceguard for Linux, current HP Serviceguard customers now have the option of replacing HP Serviceguard for Linux with SteelEye LifeKeeper clustering software.

With the SteelEye Serviceguard Program, users of HP Serviceguard for Linux have the option of migrating seamlessly to LifeKeeper for Linux, an award-winning high availability clustering solution on Linux. Lifekeeper for Linux offers commercial-grade protection of critical business applications and database workloads including SAP, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and IBM Websphere MQ, among others.

Available immediately, the SteelEye Serviceguard Program offers discounted licenses of SteelEye products to existing Serviceguard for Linux and Serviceguard for HP-UX customers along with access to SteelEye’s decade-long experience in helping customers deploy mission critical applications on Linux. Users who decide to migrate from HP Serviceguard for HP-UX, a product that HP will continue to sell, can also adopt LifeKeeper as their clustering platform.

For more information about the SteelEye Serviceguard Program and to learn more about available options, register for our September 16 webinar by going to http://www.steeleye.com/news-events/events.php. Or visit SteelEye to learn more about the nearly thirty types of applications available to support the widest range of storage configurations for Linux customers.

SteelEye Delivers Deployment Services for Comprehensive Business Continuity Assurance

2009-09-09T08:35:10-07:00

SteelEye has launched SteelEye Deployment Services to complement its extensive family of high availability, data replication and disaster recovery solutions. Performed by a SteelEye Certified Engineer, the new value-added service offerings provide customized installation, configuration, validation and administrator training for the implementation of SteelEye solutions within data centers.

SteelEye Deployment Services are delivered either on-site or remotely through a secure web connection into the organization’s data center. Available now to existing customers and prospects through SteelEye and deployment partner, Tangent Logic, the service offering also includes training to ensure knowledge transfer and an understanding of best practices for ongoing maintenance of business-critical applications and systems.

To learn more about how SteelEye’s new value-add Deployment Services support the industry’s widest range of application and server configurations, please visit our deployment services page or contact SteelEye.

Making sense of virtualization availability options

2009-08-14T13:31:47-07:00

With the recent release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and vSphere 4.0, I thought it was a good time to review some of the options available when considering the availability of your virtual servers and the applications running on them. I also will take this opportunity to describe some of the features that enable virtual machine availability. I have grouped these features into their function roles to help highlight their purpose.

Planned Downtime

Live Migration and VMware’s VMotion are both solutions that allow an administrator to move a virtual machine from one physical server to another with no perceivable downtime. The key thing to remember about this technology is that in order to move a virtual machine from one server to another without any downtime, the move must be a planned event. The reason that it must be a planned event is that the virtual machine’s memory must be synchronized between the servers before the actual switchover can occur. This is true of both Microsoft’s and VMware’s solutions. Also keep in mind that both of these technologies require the use of shared storage to hold the virtual hard disks (VMDK and VHD files), which limits Live Migration and VMotion to local area networks. This also means that any downtime planned for the storage array must be handled in a different way if you want to limit the impact to your virtual machines.

Unplanned Downtime

Microsoft’s Windows Server Failover Clustering and VMware’s High Availability (HA) are the solutions that are available to protect virtual machines in the event of unplanned downtime. Both solutions are similar in that they monitor virtual machines for availability and in the case of a failure the VMs are moved to the standby node. This recovery process requires that the machines be rebooted since there was no time to sync the memory before failover.

Disaster Recovery

How do I recover my virtual machines in the event of a complete site loss? The good news is that virtualization makes this process a whole lot easier since a virtual machine is just a file that can be picked up and moved to another server. While up to this point VMware and Microsoft are pretty similar in their availability features and functionality, but here is where Microsoft really shines. VMware offers Site Recovery Manager which is a fine product, but is limited in support to only SRM-certified array-based replication solutions. Also, the failover and failback process is not trivial and can take the better part of a day to do a complete round trip from the DR site back to the primary data center. It does have some nice features like DR testing, but in my experience with Microsoft’s solution for disaster recovery they have a much better solution when it comes to disaster recovery.

Microsoft's Hyper-V DR solution is Windows Server Failover Clustering in a multi-site cluster configuration (see video demonstration). In this configuration the performance and behavior is the same as a local area cluster, but yet it can span data centers. What this means is that you can actually move your virtual machines across data centers with little to no perceivable downtime. Failback is the same process, just point and click to move the virtual machine resource back to the primary data center. While there is no built in “DR Testing”, I think it is preferable to do an actual DR test in just the matter of a minute or two with no perceivable downtime. The other thing I like about WSFC multi-site clusters is that the replication options include not only array-based replication vendors, but also host-based replication vendors. This really gives you a wide range of replication solutions in all price ranges and does not require that you upgrade your existing storage infrastructure.

Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance basically eliminates the need to reboot a virtual machine in the event of an unexpected failure. VMware has the edge here in that it offers VMware FT. There are a few other 3^rd party hardware and software vendors that play in this space as well. There are plenty of limitations and requirements when it comes to implementing FT systems, but if you need to ensure that a hardware component failure results in zero downtime vs. the minute or two it takes to boot up a VM in a standard HA configuration, then this is an option that you may want to consider. You probably want to make sure that your existing servers are already chock full of hot standby CPUs, RAM, power supplies, etc, and you have redundant paths to the network and storage, otherwise you may be throwing good money after bad. Fault tolerance is great for protection from hardware failures, but what happens if your application or the virtual machine’s operating system is behaving badly? That is when you need application level clustering as described below.

Application Availability

Everything I have discussed up to this point really only takes into consideration the health of your physical servers and your virtual machines as a whole. This is all well and good, however, what happens if your virtual machine blue screens? Or what if that latest SQL service pack broke your application? In those cases, none of these solutions are going to do you one bit of good. For those most critical applications, you really must cluster at the application layer. What this means is that you must look into clustering solutions that run within the OS on the virtual machine vs. within the hypervisor. In the Microsoft world this means MSCS/WSFC or 3^rd party clustering solutions. Your storage options, when clustering within the virtual machine, are limited in scope to either iSCSI targets or host-based replication solutions. A demonstration of SQL Server being clustered within a Hyper-V VM using SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition is available here. Currently, VMware really does not have a solution to this problem and would defer to solutions that run within the virtual machine for application layer monitoring.

Summary

With the advent of virtualization, it is really not a question of if you need availability, but more of a question of what availability option will help meet your SLA and/or DR requirements. I hope that this information helps you make sense of the availability options available to you.

Dave Bermingham, Director of Product Management