Birmingham Hippodrome casts SteelEye
SteelEye Technology, a leading provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for multi-vendor IT infrastructures, and Open Minds, SteelEye's Solution Centre in the UK, today announced the implementation of SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux by Birmingham Hippodrome, one of the UK's most visited theatres
SteelEye ensures the continuous availability of the theatre's business critical applications, including its online ticketing system, to ensure uninterrupted access for its customers and employees.
As the busiest single theatre in the UK, Birmingham Hippodrome depends largely on its online ticketing system to meet the needs of annual audiences of 500,000. Unplanned downtime resulting from occasional outages can prove costly for Birmingham Hippodrome, with a single day of server downtime costing an estimated £20,000. To ensure the availability of its network infrastructure for both its employees and customers, the theatre selected SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux for its ability to deliver a comprehensive disaster recovery solution that could offer full failover and disaster recovery, with no single point of failure.
"Installation and set-up of LifeKeeper was quick and hassle-free," said Mike Bradford, director of operations for Birmingham Hippodrome. "With SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux, Birmingham Hippodrome now has a reliable, fault-resilient platform to ensure 24/7 availability of our systems and Web site so that even incidents of server failure now go largely unnoticed."
Failover to the back-up server is now less than a minute, ensuring continuous availability of business-critical applications and systems and protection of overall operations. The solution was distributed by SteelEye UK Solution Centre Open Minds and configured by eSpida, an IT infrastructure consultancy. Future IT plans for Birmingham Hippodrome include replicating data to a remote site instead of tape back-ups.
"LifeKeeper is very simple, very effective and extremely easy to use," said Shobana Patel, managing director for Open Minds. "As the leading alternative in reliable, flexible high availablity clustering solutions for Linux, LifeKeeper enables us to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery infrastructure involving hardware, installation and supplementary services to meet our clients' business continuity requirements."
"With the ability to safeguard network infrastructures around-the-clock, SteelEye LifeKeeper helps organizations such as Birmingham Hippodrome and its partner organizations including the Birmingham Royal Ballet and DanceXchange realize immediate value in preventing against costly system outages," said Bob Williamson, executive vice president of product management for SteelEye. "By ensuring the continuous availability of the theatre's mission-critical applications and operations, SteelEye has enabled the theatre to realign IT resources to focus on new marketing initiatives through its website and database of customers to help boost ticket sales."
SteelEye's LifeKeeper maintains the high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access. For more information, visit steeleye.com.
