Features - Storage Innovations:

SteelEye COST OF DEPLOYING FAULT RESILIENT LINUX ON IBM

SteelEye Technology Inc, a leading provider of proven enterprise IT reliability solutions for business continuity, announced the immediate availability of support within SteelEye LifeKeeper for IBM ServeRAID for IBM xSeries servers running Linux. With this announcement SteelEye is the first to enable users of IBM xSeries servers running Linux to achieve the highest levels of availability and data protection, while minimizing their total cost of ownership through the deployment of low-cost, host-based technology to achieve RAID configuration of data.

IBM ServeRAID is a host-based hardware and software solution that enables multiple drives within a physical direct-attached SCSI storage device to be deployed in a RAID configuration, in order to enhance data protection, availability and throughput -- capabilities typically associated with more expensive fibre channel storage devices. Now, with the availability of ServeRAID on Linux, and the availability of support for ServeRAID within SteelEye LifeKeeper, IBM and SteelEye customers can deploy fault resilient systems at a significantly lower cost without compromise, and further leverage the overall price/performance benefits of deploying Linux systems on xSeries servers.

"Linux is being considered a mainstream choice for business critical applications in an increasing number of market segments," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research at IDC. "This announcement targets reliability, availability and manageability of Linux-based applications, important factors in the growing acceptance of Linux. IDC expects Linux to be considered a mainstream operating environment choice in nearly every market worldwide by the end of 2005."

"SteelEye has been instrumental in helping us bring proven IBM xSeries solutions to small-to-medium-business customers looking to deploy Linux in their IT operations," said Carol Carson, program director of IBM eServer xSeries Linux. "The combination of IBM xSeries solutions and SteelEye LifeKeeper allows us to offer SMB customers, and departments of large enterprises, a cost effective solution that meets both their data and application availability requirements."

"IBM is a global channel partner and a key technology partner for SteelEye. Over the years, we have worked closely with IBM server, storage and software teams to develop a number of high availability solutions for the Linux market, including solutions for IBM DB2 Universal Database and mySAP Business Suite," said Paul Adams, president and CEO of SteelEye Technology. "We are excited that our relationship with IBM has now delivered the industry's first high availability solution for ServeRAID on Linux. The cost-benefits of host-based RAID with xSeries servers, coupled with the flexibility of SteelEye LifeKeeper, provides joint customers with a compelling solution with which to exploit the value of Linux."