Neverfail Bulletin – June 29, 2012

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Josh Mazgelis

There is no better time to prepare than the present. With wildfires raging in Colorado and the Olympics games about to disrupt businesses in London, the need for virtual and mobile computing and backup methods are imperative. Shifting to a virtualized environment can save data but also save money while creating peace of mind in face of business continuity threats.

Below are our suggested reads for this week on our Neverfail Bulletin:

• 5 Reasons Cloud Computing Is Key To Business Success

This Data Center Knowledge article lays out the five reasons for businesses to use virtual backup methods such as cloud computing. The article addresses the benefits of virtual backup such as ease of use, cost saving, increased storage capacity, flexibility and it frees up your IT staff.

• Don’t want to fight the crowds? Work from home instead

IT Pro Portal reports on how the London Olympics will be affecting the way businesses operate in London. With close to five million visitors expected to attend the games, getting employees around London will be challenging due to security constraints. This article reports on a survey which found that 88% of small businesses based in London plan to offer employees the option of working from home.

• Virtualization critical for disaster recovery

This article from Help Net Security reports on results from a BUMI survey, which polled CEOs, business owners and IT professionals at small and mid-size businesses and found that 98% of respondents thought taking more than one day to restore data was unacceptable. Yet, almost a quarter of respondents stated that they do not regularly check their backup and restoring operations for any glitches.

• Hurricane, Wildfire Seasons Highlight Importance of BC/DR Plans

InformationWeek reports of wildfires wreaking havoc in the Western United States reminds us of the importance for businesses to have a structured business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Proactive research such as monitoring the National Weather Service allows for business owners to plan for the future and monitor natural disaster trends.

Neverfail for ClusterProtector™

 

Neverfail ClusterProtector provides disaster recovery software that…

 

…intelligently monitors the cluster and its surrounding network connectivity, and can proactively distinguish whether the cluster itself can handle a node failure or whether failover to the disaster site is necessary.

 

If failover is necessary, Neverfail seamlessly provides access to an identical copy of the protected application and its data at the disaster recovery site. Once the issue is resolved, Neverfail will seamlessly failback through a simple click of a button.

 

Neverfail ClusterProtector is an ideal complement to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 failover clustering,” says Jason Hermitage, director, Windows server marketing at Microsoft Corp. “This powerful combination extends the capabilities of multi-site clustering to deliver continuous availability through any type of disaster.”

 

Neverfail ClusterProtector is available provide disaster recovery for Microsofy Cluster Server and Windows Cluster Failover Server configurations on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

 

vAppHA

 

The VMware vSphere 4 platform incorporates three platform-level technologies – High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT) and vMotion that significantly improve overall system resilience and continuous availability.

 

However, when it comes to protecting your business-critical Windows based applications, these technologies require additional functionality to deliver Continuous Application Availability.

 

Neverfail vAppHA for VMware provides that additional level of Continuous Application Availability by enabling failover under a variety of conditions that can be detected within virtual machines. Specifically business-critical applications are protected against the most common causes of downtime, such as application failures, service failures, performance degradation, configuration changes and user error.

 

After all, what’s the point of having a “Continuously Available” virtualization platform if the application itself, is no longer working?

 

 

Neverfail WANSmartTM

 

Maximizing Business Continuity while minimizing Network Costs

 

Today, few businesses can afford downtime of critical applications. With an ever increasing list of threats to availability, having a remote disaster recovery facility should be part of every organization’s business continuity strategy.

 

Keeping an off-site capability to deliver continuous availability to mission-critical applications maximizes business continuity. Yet when budgets are tight, the immediate cost of bandwidth to maintain remote copies of business applications can be daunting. In addition, managing the seamless failover and switch back between sites is non-trivial without the right software.

Neverfail WANSmart changes this. Using state-of-the art data de-duplication techniques WANSmart reduces the load on the network by factor of up to 30.

 

Costly WAN upgrades to support disaster recovery become a thing of the past. Replication traffic no longer has the same impact on other WAN users. Not only does this reduce the cost of keeping up to date the remote servers, it reduces network latency and through automated network reconfiguration seamless failover can take place.

 

 

 

 

Neverfail Tertiary™

 

Seamlessly Combining High Availability and Disaster Recovery

 

Modern solutions for business continuity need not force companies to choose between local high availability and remote disaster recovery options. Neverfail version 6 unites these capabilities by permitting an optional tertiary deployment mode. A tertiary server can be configured remotely, alongside the traditional primary/secondary server pair, to guarantee protection from site-wide disasters. This arrangement ensures that neither local nor large-scale failures adversely affect critical IT processes.

 

In the event that the secondary or tertiary server requires activation, Neverfail automatically and invisibly coordinates the process across all three servers. The result is protection from all possible causes of failure, facilitating undisturbed user access during both failover and switchback.

 

A Trio of Servers

 

Traditionally high availability solutions have been delivered by a pair of servers working together. Disaster recovery has been delivered by maintaining a copy of data off-site. Neverfail has supported both mechanisms, with automated failover locally or remotely. Neverfail Tertiary extends this architecture through the use of three servers, or a trio.

 

 

The Neverfail Solution: Neverfail Tertiary™

 

• Provides one integrated solution for both high availability and disaster recovery, reducing the cost and complexity of deployments by eliminating the need for separate solutions to solve each availability need.
• Proactively monitors the entire server environment including multi-server business applications like Microsoft SharePoint, messaging systems and other applications like CRM and ERP.
• Replicates data in real-time even over low-bandwidth, high latency WAN connections and enables seamless failover and failback using application-specific awareness, integration and automation capabilities.

 

Key Neverfail Tertiary™ Features

 

• Neverfail intelligently discovers all application files, registry settings, services and databases associated with a specific application.
• Saves time, money and lowers risk by eliminating any customization or scripting required to support specific applications.
• Automatically monitors the availability of all key services associated with a specific application.
• Provides data compression and inline data de-duplication options for low bandwidth environments.
• Protects Microsoft® Exchange, SQL and File Servers, SharePoint® and IIS, as well as RIM BlackBerry®, Progress® OpenEdge® RDBMS, Oracle® database or Lotus® Domino®.

 

Neverfail V6

Business Continuity

 

Ensure Critical Business Functions are Continuously Available

 

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” –Sun Tzu
The nature of IT systems is that at some point something will go wrong. While disasters and unplanned downtime rank as top concerns for most organizations, planned downtime for hardware maintenance and backups ranks as the top cause for downtime. Other factors such as application failure, selective component failures and SAN issues may disrupt physical or virtual clusters and entire bring down entire sites. However, companies can tackle these challenges by adopting a business-centric approach which provides the maximum depth of protection from the widest set of downtime threats. Neverfail was designed to help support your organization’s business continuity plan by preventing and protecting against a wide variety of threats and providing seamless access to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to critical business functions.

 

The Neverfail Solution: Neverfail v6

 

• Ensure business continuity by creating a dependable, cost-efficient disaster recovery plan supported by off-the-shelf software that’s easy to deploy and manage.
• Leverage one availability solution across your entire IT infrastructure instead of adding cost and complexity to your business continuity plan by using multiple tools.
• Eliminate both planned and unplanned downtime for critical business systems using a combination of high availability and disaster recovery.

 

 

Key Business Continuity Features

 

• The Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides an enterprise-wide, business-centric view of critical applications and IT services.
• Saves time, money and lowers risk by eliminating any customization or scripting required to support specific applications.
• Automatically monitors the availability of all key services associated with a specific application.
• Improves availability by showing not only whether a server is available or not, but what is happening within the application.
• Protects Microsoft® Exchange, SQL and File Servers, SharePoint® and IIS, as well as RIM BlackBerry®, Progress® OpenEdge® RDBMS, Oracle® database or Lotus® Domino®.

 

Virtual Availability Director

Manage Neverfail’s continuous availability from the vSphere Client

As datacenter admins build out their VMware vSphere virtualized environments, the VMware vCenter Server has becomes a more critical and more utilized administration console. The entire virtual workload environment can be managed through the vSphere Client. Whether moving workloads from host to host or site to site, this console is central to workload availability and disaster recovery.

But what about the rest of the server environment? Those workloads that still reside on dedicated hardware, the physical server holdouts? What about those tier-1 machines that have more stringent RTO and RPO requirements? Administrators often have several consoles through which these various servers and workloads are managed.

With the new Neverfail Virtual Availability Director, workload availability across a mixed physical and virtual environment can now be managed from within a single console. By adding the Neverfail vSphere Client Plug-in to the vSphere Client application, push-button switchover and failover for physical servers can now be done directly from the vSphere Client. For the first time, vSphere administrators can control failover of physical servers in the environment

 

 

 

Continuous Availability Products

Protecting Users from Downtime of Mission Critical Applications.

Neverfail keeps mission critical applications continuously available for the business user. Even when IT downtime is unavoidable Neverfail makes critical applications continuously available.

Neverfail leverages and protects windows, mobile and virtual platforms to deliver high availability and disaster recovery while making best use of budgets and available resources. Our products keep end users continuously connected to their mission-critical applications despite IT outages.

Through continuous replication, application monitoring, self-configuration and automated failover Neverfail protects application ecosystems. Where business processes rely on SharePoint and SQL Server availability Neverfail can protect both technologies through the same interface. The same goes for email based processes. In fact the same interface can be used to provide high availability and disaster recovery of just about any application on the windows platform.

No longer do different tools have to be used to protect application ecosystems. The Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite provides products that deliver robust high availability and disaster recovery solutions.

Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite is the powerful core technology at the center of every Neverfail solution.

Continuous replication of data from an active server to a passive server (and optional third server ) provides a unique cloning process. Neverfail is a comprehensive high availability solution for disaster recovery, business continuity and continuous data protection ensuring business continuity across unplanned or planned downtime.

The Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite is unique in providing Application Awareness, Proactive monitoring, Automatic failover and Seamless switchback.

The flexible architecture of Neverfail Heartbeat is designed to work in both LAN and WAN environments to provide High Availability and Disaster Recovery. The optional Neverfail Tertiary^TM module is available to combine the solution for the maximum protection across local and remote sites.

Where bandwidth is limited or network utilization is an issue, the standard Neverfail Low Bandwidth Module is included to optimize and reduce the amount of data that is transmitted between the two servers. The Neverfail WANSmart^TM module provides advanced de-duplication that virtually eliminates bandwidth limitations or contention.

Neverfail provides continuous availability for a wide range of applications.

Award-winning Neverfail products and plug-ins support mission-critical Windows®-based applications, including Microsoft® Exchange , IBM® Lotus® Domino® , SharePoint® , SQL Server , File Server , Captaris®RightFax and IIS . Mobile workers are protected from downtime caused by email issues or specific mobile outages caused by RIM BlackBerry® Enterprise Server demands or iPhone problems caused by ActiveSynch or Microsoft Exchange downtime.

Neverfail technology powers VMWare vCenter Server Heartbeat to make the VMware Infrastructure highly available and modules can bring similar benefits to Microsoft Hyper-V through protection of System Center. Additionally Neverfail works in conjunction with vSphere to provide extended P2V migration and protection. An application aware product, Neverfail vAppHA^TM provides extended high availability capabilities to vSphere.

With Neverfail at the center of continuity strategies, businesses can count on continuous application availability.