Kemp Tackles SMB Server Failures, Outages

Kemp Technologies is releasing two appliances - LoadMaster DR (disaster recovery) and Virtual LoadMaster - to address server failures and outages in small and medium-sized businesses. The physical (LM-DR) and virtual (VLM-DR) appliances can divert Web and application traffic from one data center to another in the event of an outage to ensure business continuity to organizations of all sizes.

The need for business continuity has increased dramatically over the last five years, says Kemp, and it wanted to address the needs of smaller businesses with as few as two sites and three servers with an affordable solution that is easy to deploy and manage. The company's roots are in the enterprise space, but as the market grew, the gap between enterprise and SMB DR solutions widened, with limited choices, functions and/or high prices.

Both appliances include syslog logging, email notifications, interface bonding and Gigabit support. LM-DR can be deployed in a distributed (Active/Active) high availability configuration, with both appliances securely synchronizing information, and the 'Round Robin' load balancing feature for all active data centers includes a chained failover option for disaster recovery. The LM-DR's MSRP is $2,990 with an introductory price of $1,590, and the VLM DR MSRP is $1,990.

Earlier this year Kemp rolled out Virtual Loadmaster, a fully functional 'virtual' version of its hardware application delivery controller targeted at service and hosting providers on a monthly for resale to customers. Each Virtual LoadMaster license is fixed at $99 and charged on a monthly basis, pay as you go.

Peak 10, a managed services provider with 19 data centers in 10 cities in the southeast U.S., has been working with the virtual appliance, says Ken Seitz, technology architect. The company decided to standardize on Kemp load-balancing in its data centers this year, and has been using VLM-DR to do a proof of concept with a virtual cloud offering for the last three months. Two customers have implemented the service, with one a true DR that would see the DNS (Domain Name System) updated and a secondary site take over in the event of a failure or outage. The second customer involves keeping two geographically dispersed databases in sync. He says Kemp is great, a natural fit for Peak 10's environment. "Feature wise, they're exactly what we need. There's nothing lacking, a tremendous value compared to the competitive landscape, and I really like their subscription licensing model."