(openPR) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR10/STE/EMEA
11th January 2005
www.SteelEye.com
Cabot Square Capital protects critical communications from downtime with SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange
London, UK - 11th January 2005 - Cabot Square Capital, a leading provider of investment capital, has implemented SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper for Exchange to protect its all-important Exchange server from damaging downtime.
Cabot Square Capital is a leading provider of investment capital for small and mid sized companies in the UK and Western Europe. The partners in the current fund of approximately £300 million include some of the most experienced and successful institutional investors in the private equity sector.
The problem
Cabot Square Capital relies on Microsoft® Exchange® for its messaging and communication needs. Its IT administrators face the classic tasks of ensuring corporate resilience for critical applications and servers and of providing disaster recovery protection.
The solution
Cabot Square Capital brought in Open Minds, a distributor of LifeKeeper from SteelEye Technology, who were able to show the company how SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange solution provided the benefits needed.
Jay Derrett, Associate Director of IT of Cabot Square Capital, said: "As part of Cabot Square Capital's ongoing reinforcement of its business procedures and infrastructure, our business continuity has been further enhanced in light of the heightened security threat to the UK. Our own strict criteria for full data replication and availability of IT have been addressed via the successful implementation of SteelEye’s LifeKeeper by Open Minds.”
One of the advantages of LifeKeeper is that it is proven to protect servers and applications using the existing local area network and a ‘Hot Backup’ server, rather than requiring an expensive wide area connection to another site. This enabled Cabot Square Capital to put LifeKeeper through full testing before going to the expense of equipping a disaster recovery site and installing connectivity between the two. SteelEye’s LifeKeeper was able to consistently provide recovery in less than 5 minutes.
The implementation
Once testing was complete and the concept proven, Cabot Square Capital’s IT managers procured a suitable remote site and the necessary wide area connectivity.
Derrett commented: “Despite the complex technical nature of the infrastructure, this project was completed on time, on budget and on specification. We continually test and monitor the LifeKeeper solution, and have yet to find fault in it. This gives Cabot Square Capital a high degree of confidence in our business continuity plan.”
LifeKeeper for Exchange now gives the company the ability to mirror Exchange data between the Mayfair site and its new disaster recovery site located in London’s Docklands. Among the other features that impressed Cabot Square Capital is the capability to pause and restart the mirror, creating a backup window, so that system maintenance and backups could be performed.
The benefits
At Cabot Square, the whole business depends on a functioning email system: downtime of the Exchange servers reduces productivity and costs money.
Derrett expanded: “We see protection of our Exchange servers with LifeKeeper as playing a key part in the development of resilience within the company’s infrastructure.”
“The level of service and general helpfulness of Open Minds and SteelEye influenced our decision, and the assistance we received from SteelEye to resolve issues was beyond the normal call of duty.”
“Overall, LifeKeeper has fostered a sense of reliability that has enabled staff to be more at ease with the email systems.”
Shobana Patel, of Open Minds, said: “This is an elegant solution to a classic situation, and certainly a scenario that we see often. LifeKeeper is a reliable, simple and cost-effective solution to the disaster recovery requirements of today’s organisations, and SteelEye went the extra mile with us to make sure the customer was happy.”
John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, Inc., said: “In today’s business environments there is little room for errors, and that includes losing communications with colleagues, markets, partners, suppliers or customers. When so much of that communication is done by email, it makes enormous sense to protect the email system, and with LifeKeeper for Exchange we enable companies to do exactly that in a cost-effective way.”
The future
Having installed and seen the value of LifeKeeper for Exchange, Cabot Square Capital is now considering using LifeKeeper within other areas of its disaster recovery approach.
[ends]
Press contacts
Rose Ross, Omarketing Limited (for SteelEye)
T: +44 (0) 20 8255 5225
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John Banfield, SteelEye Technology, Inc.
T: +44 (0)1223 208701
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About SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange
LifeKeeper for Exchange was the first single, integrated and automated solution for disaster recovery protection of Microsoft Exchange Server, providing the highest levels of availability.
While handling large email attachments, Exchange performs more frequent buffer flushes to disks. This in turn generates more data to be synchronised to the remote server, resulting in a deteriorating response from the Exchange server.
LifeKeeper handles this increased traffic load with a low bandwidth optimization module in both LifeKeeper for Windows v4.3 and LifeKeeper Data Replication for Windows v4.0 products.
It is scalable to address all levels of availability requirements, from local Exchange data replication for backup, to local automated failover, to complete wider area disaster recovery of Exchange at a remote site.
This is achieved through integrated data replication and high-availability clustering which ensures the highest level of uptime. For more information on LifeKeeper for Exchange, visit: www.steeleye.com/products/lk_for_exchange.html
About Cabot Square Capital
Cabot Square Capital, a leading provider of investment capital for small and mid sized companies in the UK and Western Europe, was founded in 1996 and is currently investing its second fund.
Cabot Square Capital provides capital to facilitate transitions, such as start-up, buy and build, turnaround and expansion. Cabot Square invests in operating companies supported by strong cash flow, financial covenants and real assets. Cabot Square Capital typically takes majority control positions and have distinguished ourselves as a flexible source of capital and a value-added partner.
For more information, visit: www.cabotsquare.com
About Open Minds
Open Minds provides software solutions, support, consultancy and training for High Availability (Fault Resilience) and Disaster Recovery solutions for IT systems.
Open Minds’ strong team of technical consultants offer experience gained from many years of successfully implementing and supporting LifeKeeper solutions throughout the world.
Open Minds serves customers throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, and partners with VAR's, Software Houses and Systems Integrators to provide a full technical backup including pre-sales, installation services and support required to fully implement a high-availability solution on Linux, Windows and Solaris. For more information, please visit www.openminds.co.uk
About SteelEye Technology
SteelEye is the leading provider of data and application availability management solutions to eliminate IT downtime.
The SteelEye LifeKeeper family of application-centric data replication, high availability clustering, and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, and enable organizations of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data.
To complement its software solutions, SteelEye also provides a full range of high availability consulting and professional services to assist organizations with the assessment, design and implementation of solutions for ensuring High Availability within their environments.
