Dice Corporation protects with SteelEye Technology

DICE Corporation specializes in creating integrated solutions for the residential and commercial security industry. When an alarm goes off in someone’s home or business, a signal is immediately transferred to that person’s security company’s central station operator, which then relays alarms and instructions to appropriate authorities, such as police and fire stations. In order for that to occur, many security companies run their own call centers and monitoring facilities.

DICE provides a comprehensive range of capabilities needed by these security companies, integrated within a suite of software modules such as alarm monitoring, customer management, accounting and even sales management and fleet monitoring.

The challenge
In addition to creating software that is installed at its clients’ locations, DICE also leverages a complete standby facility to provide clients with full failover capabilities for disaster recovery. DICE mirrors file systems and if a failure occurs at a client site, the client’s mirrored system is automatically mounted on a standby, without interrupting work on the remaining standby system.

DICE also provides full-time hosting for those providers seeking to reduce the overhead in their businesses. In doing so, it acts as an Application Service Provider, offering remote hosting of any and all of its software products, including its Central Station Automation, Backoffice Utilities, and Service Management, as well as its web-based *eLink and Asset Tracking systems. In either case, assuring high availability (HA) is absolutely critical to the health of DICE’s business and its clients’ businesses as well.

In 2006, Steve Senk, Hardware Support Manager and his team found that its core application ran more efficiently and at higher performance levels on Linux than SCO-Unix and made the decision to migrate toward Red Hat Linux. Senk faced a dilemma, however, in that its incumbent high availability solution, Sentinel, was not compatible with a Linux environment. Because its application was not based on open source language, Senk needed an HA provider that could not only operate on Linux, but that would work closely on a technical level with DICE to assure the implementation’s success.

The partnership
After a thorough review of solutions in the marketplace, Senk and his team downloaded and tested SteelEye Lifekeeper for Linux. Immediately, they saw its promise and began to implement it.

“It has a nice visual GUI, and it had a lot of similarities with the interface we were accustomed to with our previous HA solution – plus pricing was very comparable. Overall, the package was very appealing,” noted Senk. “What’s more, SteelEye provided us with all the training and support we needed to transition from assuring high availability on Unix to doing it just as effectively for Linux.”

Senk’s team soon launched a full test of the implementation, leveraging a government facility, and setting up Red Hat Linux along with LifeKeeper. They did the failover test and it worked without any problems.

The DICE team was able to migrate its entire platform to Linux with the assurance of high availability, thanks to SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux and SteelEye LifeKeeper Data Replication.

SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Linux is a software application that ensures the continuous availability of applications by maintaining system uptime. LifeKeeper maintains the high availability of clustered Linux systems by monitoring system and application health, maintaining client connectivity and providing uninterrupted data access regardless of where clients reside - on the corporate Internet, intranet or extranet. SteelEye LifeKeeper Data Replication is an industry-proven solution on Windows and Linux that provides dynamic, disk-level replication of data across local and wide area networks.

“LifeKeeper integrated very well with our existing infrastructure and SteelEye provided excellent technical support and the precise level of guidance needed to get things up and running as swiftly as possible,” noted Senk. “What’s more, with SteelEye’s support, we’ve been able to continue to meet the quickly growing demand that we’ve experienced from our client base.”

The result
Since adding LifeKeeper support, hundreds of clients have signed on for DICE’s failover service, with over 50 installations in place within DICE’s facilities.

DICE’s customers’ sites have required failover support for a variety of reasons since LifeKeeper was implemented. Each time, the software has helped DICE support seamless availability.

“The need for failovers has come as a result of a variety of situations, whether a cleaning guy plugging something in and blowing a circuit, or a power surge from a storm,” said Senk. “Regardless of the cause, LifeKeeper is there for these problems, and we’ve had nothing but success. Without high availability assurance, the best-case scenario for recovery was measured in minutes. With LifeKeeper it’s measured in seconds – and that may represent a difference of millions of dollars of damage when you’re talking about a fire in an apartment complex.”

Looking ahead, DICE is planning to offer its clients a disaster recovery service leveraging LifeKeeper for Linux. Clients can use their own servers but replicate up to seven machines remotely, regardless of where in the world their servers are situated.

“LifeKeeper has opened up new revenue opportunities for DICE by expanding the range of solutions we can offer our existing customers,” added Senk, “Given the ‘always-on-patrol’ nature of the security business, high availability and data replication are two capabilities companies are increasingly realizing they cannot do without.”

About Dice Corporation
DICE Corporation specializes in creating integrated solutions for the residential and commercial security industry. Founded in 1983, DICE Corporation is privately held and operates worldwide. Its diverse employee base of 50 programmers, technicians, client care representatives, trainers, technical writers, sales people and other administrative personnel is headquartered in Bay City, Michigan.

To contact Dice, visit www.dicecorp.com.

About SteelEye Technology
SteelEye is the leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery for Linux and Windows.

The SteelEye family of data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions are priced and architected to enable enterprises 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.

SteelEye is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, a VMware Technology Alliance partner, a Red Hat Ready partner and a Gold Member of Novell PartnerNet.

SteelEye is a subsidiary of SIOS Technology, Inc.

To contact SteelEye, visit www.steeleye.com, or call:
Within the US/Canada: 866.318.0108
Europe: + 44.(0)1223.208701
International: + 1.650.843.0655