SteelEye LifeKeeper Selected by Alstom Transport

SteelEye Technology, Inc. and Alstom Transport, in equipment services for power generation and rail transport, announced the deployment of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux to protect mission-critical applications of the maintenance system services for Beijing Metro Line 2, a rapid transport rail network serving the urban and suburban districts of Beijing.

The goal of this implementation is to control and manage high availability and potential faults to ensure the continuous availability of maintenance services for the Chinese capital’s two essential metro lines.

SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux was selected by Alstom Transport as a proven Linux environment virtual solution, offering continuous availability of the Bejing Metro system. A software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications and data by creating a fault resilient environment for virtual machines, SteelEye LifeKeeper monitors applications to ensure that any fault is automatically detected and rectified while maintaining uninterrupted services.

"We implemented SteelEye LifeKeeper for its simplicity of use and its efficiency," said Maurice Guizard, R&D Manager for Alstom Urbalis platform centralised maintenance. "High availability is key for the maintenance of modern transport systems. As there isn’t much staff on the ground to understand and take action, an efficient centralized system needs to be available. With LifeKeeper, our software applications and databases are centralised and managed 24/7 to ensure that an alert will be sent to the most skilled individual to resolve an issue."

SteelEye LifeKeeper guarantees continuous operations of the Alstom maintenance system reaching a 99.995 percent uptime rate for business critical maintenance applications. In addition, failover capabilities provide a service window for maintenance to be conducted on the first server while the second server continues to operate, which means Alstom can plan for a maximum downtime of only two minutes. The SteelEye solution also enables fault diagnostics to be sent remotely to operators making it no longer necessary for the Alstom team to ask operators to proactively check each deployed server individually.

The solution was distributed by iO Partner, an authorized SteelEye solution centre in France, and configured by Adelux. Given the success of LifeKeeper in China, Alstom plans to continue working with iO Partner to replicate the Beijing Metro implementation in future metro projects in Europe, Asia and South America.

"The fact that Alstom chose to integrate SteelEye LifeKeeper within a highly complex urban transport infrastructure project demonstrates Alstom’s confidence in SteelEye for its reliable solutions and the quality of its deployment and technical support," said François Samarcq, managing director of iO Partner.

"SteelEye remains committed to meeting the highest levels of availability customers need for evolving business requirements," said Bob Williamson, executive vice president of product management for SteelEye. "This includes ensuring business continuity and high availability for a critical component of the transport system, such as Beijing Metro, as well as offering ease of configuration to scale to changing customer requirements."

SteelEye’s LifeKeeper maintains the high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access.