Jump to content

LifeKeeper for Windows High Availability

Ensuring that your business critical applications are available regardless of hardware failure, software failure or infrastructure failure is essential to the success of your business. Downtime, both planned and unplanned, costs your business money and prolonged outages are just not acceptable in today's fast paced global market.

Application availability no longer requires expensive hardware, re-writing applications or "Cluster Gurus" on call to build and manage complicated clusters. SteelEye's LifeKeeper is the robust, flexible and easy to use Windows high availability solution that will keep your applications available without the cost and complexity of traditional clustering.

Application Availability Challenges

  • Ensuring applications are available 24x7x365 regardless of the type of failure: system, application, storage or infrastructure
  • Exceeding Service level agreements while staying within budget
  • Achieving Windows high availability using your existing hardware and infrastructure
  • Protecting all applications - not just "cluster aware" applications
  • Identifying a single solution that provides both local Windows high availability as well as disaster recovery in the event of a complete site loss
  • Minimizing downtime and shortening the "maintenance windows" associated with upgrades, services packs, etc.
  • Monitoring and ensuring the Accessibility of critical software application services and databases in addition to standard "system level" only protection
  • Achieving Windows high availability in Virtual, Physical, or Mixed environments

SteelEye LifeKeeper Advantages for Windows High Availability

  • Provides continuous monitoring at the application, storage and infrastructure levels, in addition to basic "system level" monitoring to detect most common single points of failure
  • Cost-effective
    • Reduces planned and unplanned downtime
    • Standard or Enterprise versions of operating system and applications supported
    • Does not require new or matching hardware
      • Reutilize existing hardware
      • Make use of virtualization technology such as VMWare, MS Virtual Server, Xensource, etc.
      • No shared-storage or quorum disk required
  • Protects all applications
    • Available Off the shelf SteelEye LifeKeeper High Availability Application Recovery Kits:
      • Exchange
      • SQL
      • IIS
      • Oracle
      • DNS
      • IP
      • Volume
    • Other applications can be protected using the tools provided with LifeKeeper without modifying the application to make it "cluster aware"
  • LifeKeeper can be configured for failover within a LAN or WAN or a combination of the two with a multi-node cluster that stretches LANs and WANs
    • Shared Storage or Replicated Storage supported using SteelEye DataKeeper
    • Cross subnet failover with automated DNS updates
  • Advanced Virtual Machine support for VMWare, MS Virtual Server, XenSource, Hyper-V and other virtualization technologies