SteelEye Adds Continuous Data Protection to Linux

Published: November 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software vendor SteelEye Technology this week announced that it has ported the continuous data replication features of its SteelEye Windows Data Replication software, announced for Microsoft's server operating systems in August, to the most popular commercial Linuxes.

Continuous data protection (CDP) is an add-on to the LifeKeeper high availability clustering that SteelEye is most known for. With CDP, the LifeKeeper software not only replicates data between two servers--a production machine and a backup box--but goes a lot further, allowing one to many replication of data and allowing administrators to rollback the data on a machine to multiple points in time. This rewind capability allows admins to find the exact spot where data may have become corrupted and then restart a server at that point.

According to Bob Williamson, vice president of products and technology at SteelEye, the company's techies have been working hard to make sure Linux gets the kernel extensions necessary to support CDP. In fact, it was the nerds at SteelEye who created the meta-device (MD) driver to add a rewind log to the Linux 2.6 kernel. That MD feature took SteelEye six months to create and has been in the Linux 2.6 kernel for about 18 months now. The Data Replication for Linux v6 software announced this week requires a Linux 2.6.16 kernel or higher. Officially, SteelEye supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10.

Any vendor can now make use of the rewind log that is now part of the Linux kernel to create a similar product, and SteelEye is obviously hoping that the value it is adding above this layer in its CDP replication tools is worth some cash. SteelEye has spent quite a bit of time creating graphical wizards that make it easy for system administrators to rewind data sets and check them for corruption. The extensions that allow Data Replication for Linux to beam data from a production machine out to as many as seven servers at the same time are another value-add.

SteelEye was founded in 1999 in Palo Alto, California, to provide clustering for Linux, and has since expanded into the Windows market. The company became profitable in 2004, thanks in large part to venture capital backing early on, and in June 2006, SteelEye's venture backers cashed out and sold the company to SIOS Technology, a Japanese provider of open source software that is Red Hat's largest distributor in Japan and that has been reselling the SteelEye products since 2000. SIOS Technology has several tens of millions of dollars a year in sales, and SteelEye is its first acquisition.

Data Replication for Linux v6 is bundled as part of a set of software called LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Linux, which includes LifeKeeper HA Clustering and Data Replication for Linux. This software costs $2,500 per server to license, with a $625 annual support fee--the same price SteelEye charges for its comparable Windows products.

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