Providing the highest possible availability of Oracle database on Linux with incredible cost-efficiency

Palo Alto, July 06, 2005 – Datastream Systems, Inc., a leading provider of Asset Performance Management software, has increased its installation of SteelEye LifeKeeper™ for Oracle with the purchase of two more licenses. The company continues to grow its Datastream 7i™ hosting service customer base and uses LifeKeeper to protect the solution’s 24/7/365 availability.

Datastream originally became interested in SteelEye in 2002 when it decided to migrate its Oracle database and applications from Solaris to industry-standard HP ProLiant servers running Red Hat Linux. As part of the migration, Datastream reviewed its high availability (HA) protection in order to find a product that was compatible with the new Linux platform.

Jim Plourde, Datastream’s vice president for hosted solutions, led the project team which evaluated, chose and deployed the solution. After looking at several vendors, he decided upon SteelEye’s LifeKeeper. Of the final selection, Plourde said, “SteelEye was able to show us that Linux plus SteelEye’s LifeKeeper solution gave us the lowest total cost of ownership for making our Oracle database and applications highly available.

“If we look back at the criteria, LifeKeeper for Oracle ticks all the boxes,” continued Plourde. “Does LifeKeeper failover automatically without intervention? Yes. Is it easy to manage? Yes. Has LifeKeeper ever failed us? No. Would we recommend LifeKeeper? Yes.”

LifeKeeper is a fully scaleable product, which has proved important for Datastream. We continually add customers, which adds load to the infrastructure, and periodically this means new database servers and licenses. We’ve now grown to a large number of clustered database servers, and we’ve encountered no difficulties with this at all.”

Datastream’s many global customers are the true beneficiaries of the success of the project. The highly available hosted solution has ensured that its systems meet the availability requirements of its customers. “Databases do tend to have the odd hiccup, but with LifeKeeper our customers are able to log back in immediately. It’s important to us. We aim to please all of our customers, all of the time,” reported Plourde.

Today, Datastream continues to gain benefit from running a Linux platform, Plourde continues, “The Linux operating system is open, reliable and cost-effective. Running on reliable HP ProLiant servers requires low initial investment by eliminating much of the service, support and maintenance of traditional server operating systems.”

Bob Williamson, vice president for products at SteelEye said, “Datastream was at the forefront of Linux adoption, realizing before others that both they and their customers could achieve significant cost savings by migrating off of Solaris. They continue today to use technology as a differentiator, and SteelEye is pleased to carry on our several years of partnership in supporting this mission.”

“HP and SteelEye have a long history of providing high availability solutions for enterprise customers running mission-critical applications on Linux.” said Carl DCosta, director of Infrastructure Solution Alliances at HP. “The combination of HP ProLiant servers and LifeKeeper for Linux has been proven in Datastream’s datacenter and other customer deployments around the world.”

LifeKeeper maintains the high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring the health of the entire application stack, including servers, operating system, network connections, database, application services and any other supporting piece of IT infrastructure and performing an automatic recovery procedure on detection of any problem.

With an active/active failover configuration and intelligent failover and multiple fault-detection mechanisms for detecting and recovering from hardware, component or application faults, SteelEye’s Highly Available Database Server solution for Oracle prevents system or application failures at a fraction of the cost of traditional HA solutions. Its key benefits features include a higher return on investment by eliminating the need for idle backup servers; significantly reduced staffing requirements through an easy-to-use centralized Java GUI; support for both shared storage and replicated data configurations, and functionality to protect an application as well as the Oracle database.

Aside from LifeKeeper itself, the solution includes the Oracle Application Recovery Kit, which ensures the non-stop operation of the database itself; on-site installation assistance to make sure deployment caused us no problems; a full year of 24/7 technical support, and discounted product training.

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http://www.datastream.net