SteelEye announced the general availability of SteelEye Protection Suite, a comprehensive solution that provides disaster protection of virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. SteelEye Protection Suite delivers real-time LAN and WAN replication of XenServer virtual machines. It is designed for companies that have migrated critical enterprise applications to XenServer virtual machines and want enhanced protection against data center outages to ensure business continuity.

Citrix XenServer maximizes the cost benefits that virtualization offers through server consolidation and SteelEye Protection Suite ensures complete protection of a XenServer deployment against unplanned downtime. SteelEye Protection Suite integrates with XenMotion and XenCenter to fully support manual movement of replicated VMs within a server pool. Disaster recovery protection is fully maintained as VMs are moved within the server pool. SteelEye Protection Suite is a host-based, storage repository replication solution that provides true continuous data protection (CDP), change-only replication, integrated compression and a highly optimized replication engine.

"The flexibility and ease-of-use in SteelEye Protection Suite is another clear example of our initiative to strip the complexity from today's IT infrastructure," said Garrett Gafke, CEO and president of SteelEye. "The migration of enterprise applications to virtual environments continues at a rapid pace and through collaboration with companies like Citrix, we're helping customers of all sizes ensure their data is safe and their business operations run uninterrupted."

Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management at Citrix, said, "SteelEye Protection Suite extends our XenServer platform by adding best-in-class disaster recovery capabilities to XenServer. This integrated solution provides more value for customers at an unbeatable price, which will help accelerate the broader adoption of virtualization among enterprise customers of all sizes."

According to market research firm IDC, the virtualization market is expected to expand from $1.8 billion in 2007 to $5.3 billion in 2012. John Humphreys, Program Vice President of IDC's Enterprise Platform Group and the head of the firm's Enterprise Virtualization Software Program, sees disaster recovery as a key use case and observes a growing ecosystem for disaster recovery based upon virtualization.

"Virtualization is helping organizations cope with ever-increasing disaster recovery needs," said Humphreys. "SteelEye is moving aggressively, building on a strong reputation in the data replication space and leveraging their Protection Suite software to further extend the XenServer market."

SteelEye has also joined the Citrix Ready Program, an initiative designed for organizations that have demonstrated product and solution compatibility with one or more Citrix products. The Citrix Ready designation makes it easier for customers and channel partners to identify products that have been thoroughly tested and supported and can be used with confidence in Citrix environments.

SteelEye Protection Suite for XenServer is available through SteelEye's global network of value-added resellers and OEM partners.