Legato Unveils High Availability Initiative
Legato Systems Inc. disclosed a high availability strategy, beginning with two new products and a partnership to integrate clustering products with EMC Corp. storage systems and software.
The pact with EMC (www.emc.com) is part of Legato’s (www.legato.com) strategy to make its Cluster Enterprise product more widely available.
The strategy began with the introduction of Legato’s eCluster and wanCluster high-availability (HA) products. The products are designed to support 24x7 e-commerce operations and disaster recovery.
Legato’s eCluster is an HA solution the company is targeting at e-commerce. The software monitors Web page performance, particularly load speed. Terry Dickson, vice president of product marketing at Legato, says if a Web page is loading too slowly, administrators can add another server to the cluster to improve performance.
The new wanCluster is a wide area application availability solution that enables users to replicate data across multiple sights for disaster recovery. WanCluster monitors remote site operations and will failover applications to a second site in the event problems arise at the first site. The software also controls the resynchronization of data and applications that is required to relocate operations back to an original site once that site has been recovered. The product can also be set to failover applications to local servers first, assuming they are up and running.
Legato wanCluster is supported in two configurations: wanCluster for Legato Replication to support continuous operations using any brand of storage device, and wanCluster for EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF).
Legato officials say both wanCluster, Cluster Enterprise and eCluster, will work with EMC’s open enterprise storage systems and software to support continuous operations using SRDF.
Legato’s wanCluster will support EMC’s SRDF remote mirroring software for wide area replication. The combination will provide users with a tool to manage failover of servers, applications, and EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems.
Cluster Enterprise and eCluster offer interoperability with EMC’s Celerra Network File Server system. Together the products extend application server fault resiliency to network attached storage devices.
"With Celerra and eCluster, users can manage clusters from a single point of control via a Windows or Linux machine, no matter what software the clustered servers are running," Dickson says.
David Hill, research director of storage and storage management at market research firm Aberdeen Group Inc. (www.aberdeen.com), says wanCluster is well-suited for combining disaster recovery of applications and data across wide areas.
"As IT infrastructures become more complex, software solutions that can help manage those heterogeneous distributed environments become more critical," he says.
Legato’s Dickson says the cluster products run on Windows NT, Windows 2000, and a variety of Unix platforms.