New Star's email system continues to shine - protected by SteelEye's LifeKeeper
SteelEye LifeKeeper provides continuous protection for Microsoft Exchange® across New Star's production and disaster recovery environments in London, Dublin and Bermuda
Storage Expo, London, UK - 18th October 2006 - New Star Asset Management, a leading fund management organization in the UK, has completed a staged rollout of SteelEye Technology's high availability and disaster recovery solution, LifeKeeper for Exchange, across four sites: Knightsbridge, London; Docklands, London; Dublin, Ireland and Bermuda in order to ensure complete disaster recovery for its Microsoft Exchange messaging and collaboration environment.
Charles Hornung, Director of IT at New Star Asset Management, explained: "We researched the market and selected what we considered to be the best of breed solution. I am pleased to state that LifeKeeper works. I made sure the team conducted my acid test for business continuity - pull out all the wires! With the help of LifeKeeper, our email system remains up and running and performs as expected, something which is sadly not always the case."
The company undertakes yearly reviews of its email infrastructure and before the implementation of LifeKeeper had anticipated it would take two days to fully recover from a loss of its Exchange servers. The full impact of this delay was realized following a security breach of the New Star Asset Management data center in 2004 when all systems went down and the full restoration of email took 48 hours.
"What surprised us was that during the downtime we discovered that fund managers and employees relied heavily on many aspects of Exchange - diary and contacts were actually more important than email itself," explained Hornung. "It was untenable to operate for 48 hours without full access to Exchange. In future, key applications such as email had to be available on demand to our 300 users."
New Star started work with high availability experts, Open Minds, who recommended SteelEye's LifeKeeper for Exchange. Initially email was set up to replicate between the in-house servers but, once the pilot was underway, New Star found they were better served by using SteelEye Data Replication to replicate between the production site in Knightsbridge, London and a SunGard disaster recovery (DR) site in Docklands, East London. Since then, it has also rolled out email replication to the DR site from its offices in Dublin and finally from Bermuda, which was completed in August 2006.
SteelEye LifeKeeper and Data Replication has been put through its paces as part of New Star's annual full DR simulation and a number of extra DR tests, aimed at different parts of the New Star infrastructure. Hornung concluded: "Disaster recovery testing is an excellent opportunity for us to prove the system works and test the robustness of the infrastructure. We are very pleased that LifeKeeper has not let us down, and in a disaster, we think it will enable us to continue to provide the access to the Exchange environment that the business requires."
New Star is presently exploring LifeKeeper's role as a template for protecting other critical business applications such as BizTalk, Oracle and SQL Server.
About New Star Asset Management (www.newstaram.com)
Since its foundation in 2000, New Star has become established as one of the leading brands in the UK retail fund management industry as well as a significant manager of institutional funds, international retail funds and alternative investments. In total the group manages £18.0 billion of assets and has more than 340 members of staff.
About LifeKeeper for Exchange
SteelEye's LifeKeeper for Exchange is scalable to address all levels of availability requirements, from local Exchange data replication for backup, to local automated failover, to complete wide-area disaster recovery of Exchange at a remote site.
LifeKeeper for Exchange integrates fully with Exchange Server and provides a comprehensive, automated, hands-off solution that is easy to implement.
For more information on LifeKeeper for Exchange, visit: www.steeleye.com/products/windows/lifekeeper.php
About SteelEye Technology
SteelEye is a leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery. The SteelEye LifeKeeper family of application-focused data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, and enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. To complement its software solutions, SteelEye also provides a full range of high availability consulting and professional services to assist organizations with the assessment, design and implementation of solutions for ensuring High Availability within their environments. To learn more about SteelEye, visit www.steeleye.com.
About Open Minds High Availability Solutions Ltd (www.openminds.co.uk)
Open Minds High Availability Solutions is the UK and Ireland Competency Centre for SteelEye Technology, providing pre and post sales support for the full range of LifeKeeper products.
Open Minds' expertise means they offer organisations full high availability and disaster recovery solutions for both Windows and Linux applications, from Exchange, SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle to bespoke text based and many non-standard applications. Various organisations, large and small, have used Open Minds to help them provide application recovery for their users by deploying SteelEye LifeKeeper solutions.
SteelEye Technology, SteelEye and LifeKeeper are registered trademarks of SteelEye Technology, Inc. All other product or service names may be registered trademarks or trademarks, and are the property of their respective owners.
