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AS OF 12/4/2008 2:55AM EST

SteelEye Brings XenServer Replication
By Jeff Feinman

July 21, 2008 — SteelEye, a maker of business continuity products, has created a safety gate to protect virtual machines (VM) running on Citrix XenServer from disaster.

SteelEye’s Protection Suite for XenServer, touching down today, is the first disaster recovery product that has real-time local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) replication of Xen VMs, the company claimed.

Bob Williamson, SteelEye’s senior vice president of products, said the product can replicate VMs through synchronous replication, which would be typically used in a LAN because the machines are close together, and asynchronous replication for WAN links. The product sits inside the XenServer hypervisor and will copy changes to VMs into an image on another server.

The product helps companies that have migrated enterprise applications into XenServer VMs to protect the machines against data center outages. “A company that wants some protection against their Fibre Channel [storage area network] failing or the network connection in their data center going out will have a copy of this virtual machine in as near real-time as it can be at a disaster recovery location.”

Protection Suite for XenServer can integrate with XenMotion, which moves VMs inside of a resource pool, and XenCenter, the management console for XenServer. XenServer has a resource pool that is typically tied to a Fibre Channel SAN, and VMs that have their data on that SAN will be in that same resource pool, SteelEye executives said. Protection Suite for XenServer can move a VM from one pool to another. Williamson claimed that no other product can do manual movement of VMs across different resource pools.

SteelEye also said the product provides continuous data protection and the ability to replicate VMs only when changes are occurring.

SteelEye has created its protection and replication product specifically for Citrix because XenServer is a Linux-based hypervisor, and SteelEye has experience with Linux replication, Williamson said. XenServer also offers the ability to do real-time replication.

“If you look at the VMware world, there are a number of companies that perform a level of replication for VMware ESX, but none of them are able to do it in real time,” he said. “VMware’s a very different architecture, and with VMware, interfaces that they define kind of limit you from doing real-time replication.”

Williamson added that SteelEye plans to roll out the same solution for Microsoft’s Hyper-V later in the year.

Related Search Term(s): Backup & recovery, Linux, networking, virtualization, XenServer, Citrix, SteelEye

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