Continuous Availability

A New Approach to Keeping Critical Apps "Always On"

The reality in today’s businesses, small and large, is that downtime of vital business applications can have a severe impact on business operations. Inevitably, any downtime for such applications leads to loss of productivity, loss of revenue, customer dissatisfaction and ultimately damage to reputation.

The only way to ensure that business critical systems are available 24x7 is to adopt an architecture designed to deliver Continuous Availability. Continuous Availability requires a holistic approach to IT management with a focus on meeting business needs. This means looking at critical applications to ensure reliability and availability. It also requires an understanding of how complex business systems work and ensuring the individual components work in harmony.

Server Availability vs. Ecosystem Availability

Whatever the business application, by taking a server based approach to any availability or disaster recovery project, IT administrators are adding significant complexity to their designs. This silo-based methodology almost always results in the use of several different availability / DR technologies from different vendors, with vastly different designs, capabilities and limited/no integration points.

Protecting the Entire Business Application Ecosystem

Considering the costs and complexities evident in an application-specific, silo-based, multi-vendor availability methodology, surely a better approach would be to source a complete solution, from a single vendor, that can protect your entire business application ecosystem.

The Neverfail Solution: Neverfail v6

• Neverfail has been architected from the ground up to protect data through continuous replication, to monitor the health and state of business applications and to enable automated failover.
• Continuous Availability brings automation, monitoring, application management and replication together with a focus on maintaining user connectivity to critical applications.
• Protect critical application availability against physical server hardware, network infrastructure and operating system and application failures. If a problem occurs, Neverfail can take a variety of pre-emptive, corrective actions including fully coordinated failover of all components within the ecosystem.

Key Continuous Availability Features

• The Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides an enterprise-wide, business-centric view of critical applications and IT services.
• In the event of a system crash or hardware failure, Neverfail provides continued availability to end users and clients. Leveraging the Neverfail Channel, active and passive servers communicate status via a dedicated network connection.
• Through application-specific knowledge modules, Neverfail can be automatically configured to monitor local applications and services for availability. Changes to the application configuration are automatically detected and applied to the stand-by server(s) as well.
• Business application protection provides the ability to configure and manage availability for each of the components of a multi-tier application as a single unit.
• Protects Microsoft® Exchange, SQL and File Servers, SharePoint® and IIS, as well as RIM BlackBerry®, Progress® OpenEdge® RDBMS, Oracle® database or Lotus® Domino®.

Solution Resources:

Neverfail Product Overview PDF