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Ensure Business Continuity And High Availability With SIOS

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Ensure Business Continuity And High Availability With SIOS

Alstom Protects Beijing Metro Maintenance System For Business Continuity And High Availability With SIOS Protection Suite

Alstom Transport implemented SIOS software to safeguard maintenance system services for Beijing Metro. They also wanted to a solution that offered business continuity and high availability. They are a global leader in equipment and services for power generation and rail transport. They have selected SIOS to protect data and mission-critical applications used in the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro Line 2.

The Challenge

Alstom integrates the Urbalis™ solution. It is the most advanced signalling system in the world. As the brain and the nervous system of a mass transit network, its function is to control train movement and ensure train safety and optimize traffic operations. All this while providing system maintenance. In addition, its Maintenance Supervision System (MSS) centralizes detection of failures in trackside equipment. The system also provides remote diagnostics to forecast train stopping with swift and efficient replacement of faulty equipment. To manage these sophisticated maintenance systems, the Alstom Transport Urbalis R&D team needed a Linux environment virtual solution to give its client business continuity and high availability. And at the same time, optimizing the cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of the urban transport system.

The Solution

The team conducted extensive and thorough research for the best solution to meet their requirements. Finally, the Alstom IT team selected SIOS Protection Suite for Linux. It is a software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications and data by creating a fault resilient environment for virtual machines. SIOS software monitors applications to ensure that any fault is automatically detected and rectified while maintaining uninterrupted services.

Benefits

SIOS Protection Suite is ideal for any company seeking business continuity and high availability during downtime. It enables continuous operations of the Alstom maintenance system during planned downtime for maintenance or upgrades. This also applies in the event of a system failure or if an application ceases to respond. Alstom determined that it could reach a 99.995% uptime rate for their business critical applications. If the first server goes down due to an electrical outage or to unavailability of a network connection, data will be protected while applications failover to the second server. This failover capability provides a service window for maintenance to be conducted on the first server while the second server continues to operate. This means Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of only two minutes (the time it takes to complete a failover). The SIOS solution also enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators. Therefore, it is no longer necessary for the Alstom team to ask operators to proactively check each deployed server individually.

To find out how SIOS products, go here
To read about how you can also achieve business continuity and high availability, go here

Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution For Hedge Fund 

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Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution For Hedge Fund

Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution For Leading International Macro Hedge Fund

netConsult Selects SteelEye LifeKeeper For Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution of Exchange, Oracle9i and SQL Server Trading Systems.

netConsult is a leading consulting and systems integration provider specializing in data security management for financial services firms. It has implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper to provide automated disaster recovery protection for one of its key clients, a leading international macro hedge fund based in London, England.

Complete, Automated Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution

“Due to the real-time, high-value nature of our client’s business, any kind of failure in their mission critical systems prevents them from completing timely trades. It can have significant impact upon their business. Especially,  in terms of the profitability of transactions and the confidence of their investment clients,” said Richard McDonald principal and founder of netConsult. “SteelEye LifeKeeper is one of four disaster recovery software solutions we researched on behalf of our client. The deciding factors in favor of LifeKeeper were that: it was the only truly complete, automated solution for disaster recovery. It was the only product that was capable of being demonstrated out of the box. And was by far the most reasonably priced given the complexity of our client’s environment, including the need to cluster a heterogeneous mix of storage and servers.”

Increased Server And Application Availability

“Coupled with overall heightened security concerns, it became imperative for our client to implement a comprehensive solution for business continuity. It should function reliably and efficiently. Regardless of the scale of interruption, from a simple server failure to a disaster requiring complete site recovery,” McDonald added. “We appreciated the assurance of disaster recovery protection. Additionally, our client has benefited greatly from the overall increase in server and application availability that the LifeKeeper clustering solution has made possible.”

Effectiveness & Stability Of LifeKeeper

LifeKeeper is being used to ensure complete disaster recovery protection of netConsult’s client’s core, business-critical trading systems. These include: Calypso a currency trading system based on Oracle 9i from Calypso Technology; Tradar Portfolio, also a currency trading system based on Microsoft SQL Server from Tradar Limited; and Microsoft Exchange Server, a messaging and collaboration platform being used for internal communication and confirmation of trading orders. The SteelEye LifeKeeper solution provides automated monitoring, failover and failback of these systems, coupled with integrated disk-level data replication between the customer’s primary business location in the heart of London, and its managed recovery site some distance outside of London, operated by Sungard Data Systems.

SteelEye LifeKeeper is installed on eight servers in a geographically dispersed, heterogeneous stretch-cluster configuration of four server pairs. All running the Windows 2000 operating system – four HP ProLiant BL20p G2 blade servers, accessing Hitachi Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage at the primary location. They are individually clustered over a wide-area network with four HP ProLiant DL380 G2 and DL380 G3 servers, accessing HP MSA1000 storage at the recovery site. Each of the server pairs provide individual high availability protection for the Calypso, Tradar and Exchange systems respectively. The fourth server pair ensures high availability of file and print services. The integrated, disk-level data replication capabilities within LifeKeeper enable the continuous synchronization of the server pairs. Thereby the creation of a stretch-cluster configuration to support disaster recovery over a wide area network.

Disaster Recovery Clustering of Exchange

McDonald went on to say “LifeKeeper proved to be a hands-off solution that was easy to implement in an environment known for its complexities. Since going live we have experienced several server outages. The incidents involved our client’s Oracle and SQL Server systems. LifeKeeper handled so well that no interruption or change in level of service was noticed by any users.”

In addition to the benefit of complete Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution, the LifeKeeper solution has proved to be very useful during systems maintenance. Previously, it was necessary to undertake the manual and time-consuming process of configuring and manually migrating users to backup systems. Now, with LifeKeeper, production systems and user connectivity can be automatically failed over to the recovery location while maintenance is applied to the primary server. Once this task is complete, systems and users are failed back in a similar automated fashion.

“The support we have received from the SteelEye technical team during and after implementation has been excellent,” McDonald concluded. “The deployment of disaster recovery solutions for environments like Exchange and Oracle is no simple task. SteelEye continues to demonstrate a broad range of experience and knowledge, which we value greatly.”

Ensure Business Continuity

“We are excited by the selection of our SteelEye LifeKeeper Disaster Recovery solution by netConsult. The latter is a very well-respected financial services IT consultancy,” said John Banfield, European sales director for SteelEye. “The ability of the LifeKeeper solution to address their client’s critical business requirements and technical complexity is a strong validation of our approach. It is solid proof that LifeKeeper delivers industrial-strength assurance of continuity in the most demanding of environments.”

To find out how our Disaster Recovery Protection Clustering Solution can benefit you, go here.

Disaster Recovery, Data Replication For Cabot Square Capital

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Disaster Recovery Data Replication For Cabot Square Capital

Cabot Square Capital Ensures Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Data Replication with SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange

Leading provider of investment capital Cabot Square Capital implemented SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper for Exchange to provide disaster recovery, data replication. They wanted to protect its all-important Exchange server from damaging downtime.

The Problem

The company relies on Microsoft Exchange for its messaging and communication needs. Its IT administrators face the tasks of ensuring corporate resilience for critical applications and servers. It has to ensure business continuity, disaster recovery, data replication protection as well.

Enhancing Business Continuity

Cabot Square Capital were introduced to Open Minds, a distributor of LifeKeeper from SteelEye Technology. They were shown how SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange solution provided the disaster recovery, data replication protection needed.

Jay Derrett, Associate Director of IT of Cabot Square Capital, said: “As part of Cabot Square Capital’s ongoing reinforcement of its business procedures and infrastructure, our business continuity has been further enhanced in light of the heightened security threat to the UK. Our own strict criteria for full data replication and availability of IT have been addressed via the successful implementation of SteelEye’s LifeKeeper by Open Minds.”

LifeKeeper has plenty of advantages. It is proven to protect servers and applications. It uses the existing local area network and a ‘Hot Backup’ server, rather than requiring an expensive wide area connection to another site. This enabled Cabot Square Capital to put LifeKeeper through full testing before going to the expense of equipping a disaster recovery site and installing connectivity between the two. SteelEye’s LifeKeeper was able to consistently provide recovery in less than 5 minutes.

Implementation

Once testing was complete and the concept proven, Cabot Square Capital’s IT managers procured a suitable remote site and the necessary wide area connectivity.

Derrett commented: “Despite the complex technical nature of the infrastructure, this project was completed on time, on budget and on specification. We continually test and monitor the LifeKeeper solution. Till now, we have yet to find fault in it. This gives Cabot Square Capital a high degree of confidence in our business continuity plan.”

LifeKeeper for Exchange now gives the company the ability to mirror Exchange data between the Mayfair site and its new disaster recovery site located in London’s Docklands. Among the other features that impressed Cabot Square Capital is the capability to pause and restart the mirror, creating a backup window. This way, system maintenance and backups could be performed.

Reliable, Simple And Cost-Effective Solution To Meet Disaster Recovery Requirements

At Cabot Square, the whole business depends on a functioning email system. Downtime of the Exchange servers reduces productivity and costs money.

Derrett expanded: “We see protection of our Exchange servers with LifeKeeper as playing a key part in the development of resilience within the company’s infrastructure.”

“The level of service and general helpfulness of Open Minds and SteelEye influenced our decision. The assistance we received from SteelEye to resolve issues was beyond the normal call of duty.”

“Overall, LifeKeeper has fostered a sense of reliability that has enabled staff to be more at ease with the email systems.”

Shobana Patel, of Open Minds, said LifeKeeper is a reliable, simple and cost-effective solution to the disaster recovery requirements of today’s organisations. SteelEye went the extra mile to make sure the customer was happy.

John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, Inc., said: “In today’s business environments, there is little room for errors. That includes losing communications with colleagues, markets, partners, suppliers or customers. When so much of that communication is done by email, it makes enormous sense to protect the email system. With LifeKeeper for Exchange, we enable companies to do exactly that in a cost-effective way.”

For more information about business continuity, disaster recovery, data replication, go here.

High Availability Clustering Solution for Point of Sale Server Systems

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Migros implemented SIOS Protection Suite high-availability clustering solution to constantly monitor their POS server systems

Case Study: Migros — SIOS DataKeeper Clusters

The Swiss supermarket giant achieves critical business continuity with SIOS Data Replication Solutions. SIOS software replication secured the data generated by the monitoring software. SIOS Protection Suite software provides continuous monitoring of servers, storage, applications, databases and network connections to detect points of failure. The high-availability clustering solution aims to reduce planned and unplanned downtime, maintain client connectivity and provide uninterrupted data access.