SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer

Bob Williamson, VP of Business Development for Steeleye, and I played a rousing game of telephone tag and meeting shuffle before finding a time that would work for a discussion of Steeleye's SteelEye Protection Suite. I was traveling making the task even more complex that it usually is. Since I've followed Steeleye for years, I was eager to learn more about the protection suite.

Here's how Steeleye describes Steeleye Protection Suite for XenServer

SteelEye Protection Suite delivers real-time LAN and WAN replication of XenServer virtual machines. It is designed for companies that have migrated critical enterprise applications to XenServer virtual machines and want enhanced protection against data center outages to ensure business continuity.

Citrix XenServer maximizes the cost benefits that virtualization offers through server consolidation and SteelEye Protection Suite ensures complete protection of a XenServer deployment against unplanned downtime. SteelEye Protection Suite integrates with XenMotion and XenCenter to fully support manual movement of replicated VMs within a server pool. Disaster recovery protection is fully maintained as VMs are moved within the server pool. SteelEye Protection Suite is a host-based, storage repository replication solution that provides true continuous data protection (CDP), change-only replication, integrated compression and a highly optimized replication engine.

Snapshot Analysis

Steeleye's LifeKeeper has a long track record of providing clustering software that targets high availability and disaster recovery for UNIX, Linux and Windows systems. As organizaitons moved to encapsulate workloads in virtual machines, Steeleye saw both a challenge and an opportunity. As I wrote a while back in a post titled, Which should I choose Clustering or Virtual Machine Replication?,which basically addressed the challenge that established clustering software suppliers faced.

They had to find a way to keep being relevant in a world in which virtual clients and servers could be replicated and orchestrated to achive similar levels of availability and reliability. Although Steeleye knew that its clustering software was mature and had stood the test of time, it also knew that if it didn't stay ahead of the virtual machine trend on industry standard systems, it would be increasingly difficult to convince organizations that traditional clustering software was of value.

They examined Citrix's product portfolio and saw an opportunity to add value to what Citric was already doing. Steeleye integrated it's HA software into Citrix's XenMotion and XenCetner and then the company joined the Citrix Ready™ Program. This is a Citrix initiative designed to help partners that have demonstrated product and solution compatibility with one or more Citrix products. The Citrix Ready designation makes it easier for customers and channel partners to identify products that have been thoroughly tested and supported and can be used with confidence in Citrix environments.

If your organization is using Citrix's XenServer, XenMotion and XenCenter and need higher levels of availability and reliability than available using Citrix's tools, it would be wise to learn more about Steeleye's product portfolio.