SteelEye™ LifeKeeper^®

SteelEye™ LifeKeeper^® is an availability cluster solution. LifeKeeper is able to integrate applications and their data into one high availability concept. LifeKeeper works with MS Windows and different LINUX distributions.

The special focus of SteelEye™ LifeKeeper^® is an application driven cluster solution. It's easy to observe and to protect a single application. If a malfunction of one of the protected applications is detected, only this application will be restarted or switched over to a backup node. All needed resources will be switched too. Other applications on the same node without failure will stay in service.

The ability of the application is provided by a special part of the LifeKeeper software: the Application Recovery Kit (ARK). The content of the ARK tells LifeKeeper how to start, stop, or test the application, and last but not least which resources are necessary for the application to work correctly. Application recovery Kits are available for a lot of standard applications such as databases, mail systems, infrastructure components and so on.

On a LifeKeeper cluster node, there may be protected and unprotected applications running at the same time. After a crash of a complete node, unprotected applications will be not available.

A very important point of LifeKeeper philosophy is to protect the data and to ensure data integrity. There is a wide range of possible scenarios in which LifeKeeper can work. This range starts with data replication, shared storages and ends with replication using WAN connections. This makes it possible to build wide area clusters with nodes in different locations.

Many hardware platforms are certified for LifeKeeper (x86, Opteron, OpenPower, EM64T). There are a lot of possibilities with different storages based on SCSI or Fibre Channel, SAN or NAS configurations. The nodes of a LifeKeeper cluster can work with heterogenous hardware, they do not require the exact the same configuration. The configuration of the nodes is driven by the application on the primary node and on the backup node too.

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additional information:

LifeKeeper for Linux

LifeKeeper for Windows

SteelEye company profil

SteelEye™Technology Inc.

LifeKeeper was originally designed and developed by AT&T Bell Labs to ensure high availability of their worldwide voice network system running on Unix-based Star Servers. The need to ensure the highest levels of availability for such a mission-critical system required a design focused on reliability, performance and efficiency, which are the hallmarks of LifeKeeper today.

After AT&T divested the LifeKeeper division to NCR, SteelEye acquired the technology and brought onboard the original development and QA teams who today form the core of our Technology and Services resources. This depth of knowledge and expertise in high availability systems, storage management, and LifeKeeper is what differentiates SteelEye and their solutions.

The SteelEye™LifeKeeper^® family of software products and services offer unique scalability in terms of integrated solutions for data protection, high availability clustering, and wide-area disaster recovery.

SteelEye™LifeKeeper^® enables enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous uptime of business-critical systems. With 'out of the box' support for the widest range of applications, databases, and storage subsystems running on Intel-based Windows and Linux servers, SteelEye™LifeKeeper^®ensures enterprise-grade reliability at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional solutions.

SteelEye products and services are available worldwide, and may be purchased directly from SteelEye or through an international network of reseller, systems integration, and service provider network partners.