SteelEye Powers Hot Sites for Ntakt7

December 17, 2007; 08:02 AM

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SteelEye Technology®, a provider of award-winning data replication, application monitoring and disaster recovery products for Linux, Windows and virtual server platforms, today announced a partnership with Ntakt7 that is already enabling hundreds of small and medium businesses (SMBs) to achieve enterprise-level business continuity protection. SteelEye LifeKeeper provides the key data replication and disaster recovery capabilities within Ntakt7’s “hot site” offering, a subscription-based, hosted service that provides off-site data replication. More than just data backups, hot sites are actual off-site copies of a technology service’s production environment (i.e., email, CRM, etc.), including both data and applications that run the service. Mirroring the entire production environment enables near-instant failover in the event of a disaster, instead of delays as long as a day due to data restoration times.

Headquartered in the Los Angeles area with offices in Chicago, Houston, Cincinnati and New York City, Ntakt7 provides businesses with a range of services for business continuity, disaster recovery, IT infrastructure optimization and hot site backup solutions. Ntakt7’s hosted disaster recovery services in particular have fueled its fast growth over the last several years by giving the SMB market a simpler and more affordable way to truly assure business continuity.

“In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we had a surge in interest from our prospect base – they realized they needed off-site backups of their data in light of the disruptions Katrina caused,” said Aaron Sweemer, head of engineering for Ntakt7. “Memories of Katrina affected the plans for companies within nearly every industry, but many SMBs were concerned they didn’t have the investment needed to build staff and run a remote data center.”

To build its hot site offering, Ntakt7 evaluated offerings from several other providers, including DoubleTake and Neverfail, but SteelEye’s suite of products clearly came out on top.

“Uptime, data integrity and security were top of mind in our evaluation,” noted Sweemer. “SteelEye was overwhelmingly the best option. The product fit perfectly into our solution from an integration point of view. Its technical capabilities were exactly what we wanted and overall we felt our businesses complimented each other so well.”

By leveraging SteelEye’s product suite and the company’s remote facility in Chicago and VMWare to create virtual machines, Ntakt7 has been able to make its hot site” available to customers on a monthly subscription basis, at price points to meet the SMB market’s needs.

In one case, Ntakt7 worked closely with a customer to protect around 100 servers. Upon analysis, the team determined that only 20 virtual machines would be necessary to protect the most critical data and applications. Ntakt7 identified the critical servers, virtualized them, and executed an initial synchronization. From there, the virtual machines were moved to Chicago and powered up. Secure links were established for communications before turning SteelEye’s products loose to begin live synchronization.

The SteelEye suite continually assures the primary servers and hot sites remain in perfect synchronization. Ntakt7 runs tests on the sites every six months for the customer, which has experienced no large- scale disasters but several instances of minor emergency where the hot site was invoked successfully.

“We just turned it on and everything was cooking,” said Sweemer. “LifeKeeper is really impressive because it includes everything in one package, from disaster recovery tools to WAN clustering to an array of standard plug-ins for common applications (i.e. Oracle SQL), all ready to go.”

The partnership between SteelEye and Ntakt7 has also yielded significant sales channels that complement each other’s businesses.

“Service providers such as Ntakt7 as well as software solution vendors and hardware appliance vendors have recognized that integrating business continuity into their offerings is critical to delivering value to their customers” noted Bob Williamson, VP of Products for SteelEye. “SteelEye’s has established the LifeKeeper Protected Program to assist these partners in quickly integrating our powerful data replication, continuous data protection and application monitoring into their own product offerings.”

About Ntakt7

Ntakt7’s name is derived from its key mission – to help companies who rely on technology keep their businesses “intact” in the face of potential disaster. Headquartered in the Los Angeles area with offices in Chicago, Houston, Cincinnati and New York City, Ntakt7 provides services for business continuity, disaster recovery, IT infrastructure optimization and hot site backup solutions. Ntakt7 brings enterprise-class IT infrastructure options to small and medium businesses. By leveraging open source technologies, years of expertise, and the performance and cost benefits of virtual private servers Ntakt7 offers customers security, reliability and assurance in planning and implementing high-performance IT environments.

About SteelEye Technology, Inc.

SteelEye is the leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery for Linux and Windows.

The SteelEye family of data replication, high availability and disaster recovery solutions are priced and architected to enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data.

To support ISVs, IHVs and solution providers integrate business continuity into their offerings, SteelEye has established the LifeKeeper Protected Program which provides development and test licenses of SteelEye products as well as training and technical support. More information is available at www.steeleye.com/protected.

SteelEye is a subsidiary of SIOS Technology, Inc.

Trademark Notice

SteelEye Technology, SteelEye and LifeKeeper are registered trademarks of SteelEye Technology, Inc. All third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.