The security firm SteelEye launches today a brand new product called Protection Suite with offers disaster recovery capabilities for Citrix XenServer.
Differently from the approach used by the company (and many competitors) so far, Protection Suite doesn’t sit inside a virtual machine but inside the XenServer Dom0.
From there the product is able to backup all or some virtual machines from the production site to the recovery site, in a way similar to the new VMware Site Recover Manager (SRM) does for VI 3.5.
Protection Suite interacts with Citrix XenCenter to register the copied VMs and power them on in case of disaster at the primary site.
To achieve the goal the suite is made of two products: LifeKeeper for Linux and a new Data Replication for XenServer.
While VMware SRM requires a replication between the back-end storage arrays at the primary and recovery sites, Protection Suite performs a host-based replication, using the Ethernet connection that links two virtualization hosts.
This approach allows to run across a WAN link but it may have a major bandwidth constrain depending on the size of the virtual infrastructure.
Protection Suite will be available next week for all versions of Citrix XenServer with a per-server licensing model.
The price starts at $2495 per server (unlimited VMs) with XenServer Standard Edition.
SteelEye has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.