Tuesday, 22 May 2012


SteelEye vAppKeeper for Linux 

SteelEye recently released vAppKeeper for Linux 7.5.  vAppKeeper adds application awareness to VMware’s native HA capabilities to drastically accelerate application failure identification and, in turn, reduce recovery times.   vAppKeeper enables organizations to confidently virtualize business-critical applications by integrating seamlessly into vSphere environments and allowing the full benefits of server virtualization to be realized while also improving resiliency.
This release adds:
  • Single-node protection integrated with VMware HA
  • vSphere Client Plugin
  • Multi-level policy
  • Temporal recovery logic
  • Notification Only/Maintenance Mode
  • Virtual platform support
    • vSphere 4.1 and 5.0
  • Guest operating system support
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6
    • CentOS 5, 6
    • SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 11
Contact info@openminds.co.uk or www.openminds.co.uk/contactus for more information.

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Open Minds April Newsletter


SteelEye Protection Suite for Linux V7.3 Now Available
On February 15, SIOS released version 7.3 of the SteelEye Protection Suite for LinuxRead more...
SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows v7.2 Now Available
On February 17, version 7.2 of the SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows was also released. Included in this update:

  • DataKeeper and DataKeeper Cluster Edition 7.2
  • LifeKeeper for Windows v7.2 and Protection Suite.  Read more...
If you have annual support, the upgrade to this release is free. Contact support@openminds.co.uk to request the new bits. Complete details on version Lifekeeper for Linux 7.3 and Windows Lifekeeper 7.2 are available in the release notes (available upon request).
Solutions by Open Minds:
Data replication to iSCSI

Data Replication and Manual Restore 

More...

High Availability and Disaster recovery

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Monday, 28 February 2011

Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Solutions

Microsoft Exchange server downtime can cost companies millions of pounds a year. Technical consultants therefore work with these organisations to reduce / minimise downtime through the implementation of high-availability systems and disaster-recovery systems. Building a geographically dispersed Exchange cluster is not a simple task; it requires proper planning, testing, deployment and validation. In this blog we aim to cover the basic steps during the planning stage for your company’s high availability/ disaster recovery plans. You have taken the first and most critical step toward deploying the system – recognising the need!
The process begins with the initial decision to implement an Exchange disaster-recovery system and continues as long as that system is in production.  In the planning phase, you must answer these critical questions:

·         What is the recovery time objective for the system?

·         Based on the rate of change and expected growth, what bandwidth is required between the primary site and the disaster recovery site?

·         What pieces of the system besides the Exchange server and processes them-selves must be monitored and recovered? Is there a minimum set of functionality that's acceptable for some time following recovery? If so, what is that subset?

·         Are there site-specific error conditions that should be optimised for in the monitoring phase?

·         Will automatic fail-over be allowed, or should administrator notification be the first recovery action?

·         Which e-mail clients must be protected during fail-over? What access methods do they use? And how will these be migrated to the disaster recovery site during recovery?


The choice of a disaster recovery site should be the first decision you make. For some organisations backing up to a remote office is the perfect solution while others may look to collocated hosting centres that provide full redundancy for power and network connectivity. You need to ensure which ever route is take there are techniques and procedures in place for building a test environment, staff used to build the DR/HA environment should also be heavily involved in testing solutions and they should be hands-on in the deployment and validation stages.
The testing phase is often difficult because properly emulating a production Exchange environment within a test lab requires simulating cross-site network connectivity, user load, the influence of adjunct programs such as backup jobs and other factors unique to the specific environment. The closer you can get to a mirrored production environment within the test lab, the fewer issues you will see arise during deployment.
In testing, you are looking to answer questions such as these:

·         Does the failover software perform as expected on both detection and recovery?

·         Does the data replication software perform as expected in terms of speed and data consistency?

·         Is there any noticeable performance impact on end users from the presence of the monitoring or data replication software?

·         Are the various clients able to seamlessly migrate to Exchange running on the disaster recovery server?


Delivery of the solution should be straight forward if you assembled a team of experts and successfully emulated the production environment during the testing phase. Make sure you schedule sufficient time for the initial data mirror across site and subsequent testing of failovers to the disaster recovery site and back to the production server. Each of those tests should validate that client redirection works as planned and that all services needed for a fully functional Exchange environment are recovered.
Following the initial deployment, it is recommended that failover tests be made after any change to the Exchange environment (such as installation of service packs, introduction of new services, etc.). Carrying out regular system checks will avoid the disaster recovery system not working correctly and resulting in being unable to bring Exchange into service because of an administrative change that was not accounted for.

Open Minds HAS Ltd has been working with customers to deploy Exchange Server High Availability for over 10 years. To speak to one of our experts please contact us on 0121 533 7178

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Microsoft SQL Server protection


Every business has mission critical applications and data. Therefore, it is very important to keep servers up and running all the time 24 X 7. In today’s world there is a need to store and process terabytes of data and it is vital to make this data highly available.

High availability is all about your site, database or email being accessible all the time. High availability solutions minimise the downtime for these mission critical applications, such as SQL, Exchange or IIS.

Microsoft SQL Server is a powerful database used to store and maintain data in businesses of various levels, be they small, medium or large. As such loss of a MS SQL server can have a huge impact on business operations.

Our consultants can take you through pre and post installation concepts and common issues you come across while working with SQL Server. We can help answer common question like what is the best concept for you? What should you use?

1.    Database mirroring?

2.    Log shipping?

3.    Clustering?

4.    Or just real-time replication.

Business Data is the core of your business and as such it should be protected. If you are business owner you should be asking yourself; how much time can the business afford without access to critical data or emails? How much money could I lose if my website, ordering system was down? Depending on the type of business you may also want to check if you have any service level agreements you could fail to deliver due to systems being down.

If you are the IT administrator you will be worried about getting the systems up and running again. Your main pain point will be how quickly can I get this server back online? The answer is days if you are using tape backup and minutes if you are using a failover solution.

Although in this blog I have covered Microsoft application we can cover Linux applications and also bespoke Microsoft or Linux applications.

If you have a project like this coming up please feel free to give Open Minds a call on 0121 533 7178.

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Birmingham Hippodrome

We are fortunate in having so many great customers, and this month we have been lucky enough to have released a case study from Birmingham Hippodrome. A customer introduced to us by one of our partners, eSpida.

We have been working with eSpida for around 7 years now, and we have worked with them on many projects. Including implementing systems as diverse as SAP on Linux, Microsoft Exchange Servers and Linux file servers. They have a great attitude and we thoroughly enjoy working with them.

To read more about the work we have done with Birmingham Hippodrome and eSpida, the case study is available here. For more info on eSpida visit: www.espida.co.uk

Thursday, 18 June 2009

Ensuring High Availability on a budget

In trying to meet the conflicting demands of costs and maintaining uptime, do you have to look for more creative ways to spend your IT budget?

Many organisations are turning to Linux for a proven and reliable solution. As the SteelEye Solution Centre for UK, Ireland and the Gulf region, Open Minds have been providing organisations with Linux clustering and Disaster Recovery for over 10 years, providing enterprise-grade clustering for the Linux market. SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux provides enterprise-grade high availability for the most demanding deployments, supporting configurations built on commodity servers and storage whilst removing the need for shared storage and enterprise edition licences.

If you would like to find out more about how we provide enterprise grade Linux solutions to our customers, then please reply to this email with your telephone number and we will contact you to discuss your requirements in greater detail. The first five enquires will receive a copy of “Free Software, Free Society” selected essays of Richard M. Stallman, and all enquiries will be sent a free Linux distribution CD courtesy of the Linux Emporium. For more information on Linux adoption, click here

Friday, 29 May 2009

Celebrate with us...

Open Minds are pleased to announce that the SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows was recently awarded the 2009 Global Product Excellence – Disaster Recovery Award by the Info Security Products Guide Awards. The Guide is the world’s most comprehensive guide on Info Security with the awards recognising and honouring excellence in all areas of information security.

The SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows provides a highly functional and cost effective combination of data replication and application recovery for your file servers and IIS servers.
To see for yourself why SteelEye Protection Suite for Windows was awarded the 2009 Global Product Excellence – Disaster Recovery Award, please send us and email to evalrequest@openminds.co.uk to request a free 30 day product evaluation license.

Furthermore, to celebrate SteelEye’s success, if you order the award winning SPS for Windows before 18th June 2009, we will give you LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Bespoke Applications, normally costing £350.00, free of charge. To take advantage of this offer, please quote 11990f when ordering your SPS for Windows.

Warm regards

The Open Minds Team