SteelEye Powers Hot Sites for Ntakt7

SteelEye Technology,
a provider of 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 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.

Ntakt7

SteelEye Technology, Inc.