NEWSLETTER - WHY EVERY ORGANISATION NEEDS HIGH AVAILABILITY
Nowadays, all organisations have to ensure continued user and business operations to maintain or increase their financial and competitive position, satisfy key stakeholders and sustain corporate reputation.
Increasingly, they must also respond to and mitigate security threats and regulatory compliance risks. To achieve these business, operational, and regulatory goals, user productivity and application continuity cannot be compromised. If it is, due to lack of transparent application or network services connectivity, the result can include transaction loss, delays in time to market, supply chain disruptions, customer attrition, cost penalties, negative publicity, and regulatory fines.
Business advantages of continued user productivity and connectivity with critical applications and services can be sustained through high availability. High availability offerings have now emerged that deliver on the next generation of innovation - integrating and unifying historically distinct and separate availability models.
Keeping users connected
A true high availability model expands the concept of availability beyond an infrastructure perspective in terms of system or servers and ensures that users remain seamlessly connected to critical applications and services.
A high availability solution will integrate and unify historically distinct and separate availability models - replication services and failover services - and eliminate the need to recover from backups. This integrated level of offering provides a company’s users with continued application services and data availability through the automated detection of different failures and seamless, automated failover of business operations to an alternate source in the event an underlying problem is detected.
Traditional approaches to providing system availability or data availability, such as replication services, failover services and data backup, have focused on recovery of the data from some failure event versus focusing on keeping the application, network services, and business running and providing transparency to any event that occurred.
The limitations of existing availability models
Challenges with traditional replication services have included lack of user and application transparency, long failover times to an alternate source, as well as no configuration information at the alternate source for automated application services failover and continued operations.
Problems with a failover services model have included a focus on hardware failures only, with no application awareness or integration and required application restarts impacting application and user business continuity. Historical challenges with the tape-backup model have included unsatisfactory recovery times and recovery points from tape media, shrinking backup windows unable to meet data growth rates, and the high IT overhead, manual processes, and tape failure rates limiting recovery and availability.
These traditional availability methods have not taken into account the perspective of the user and the transparency in which the system stays connected to applications to sustain operational productivity and continuity of work processes and communications.
Benefits of a true high availability approach
A true high availability approach allows a company to continue business processing and:
- Maintain its financial and /or competitive position by avoiding loss of revenue or employee productivity
- Preserve customer, partner or shareholder satisfaction as well as brand/corporate reputation
- Proactively respond to regulatory, corporate governance, and internal service-level requirements around business continuity, data availability, and recovery
Affordable, high availability solution
Traditionally the costs of implementing a true high availability approach have been prohibitive to all but the largest organisations. But now, through our partner Neverfail, we can offer high availability and disaster recovery solutions that give you the confidence to maintain interruption-free application environments.
Easy to install, configure and operate, your business can achieve cluster-class high availability for communications and critical data at a fraction of the cost of competitive offerings.
The solutions include:
- Neverfail Heartbeat - the powerful core technology at the centre of every Neverfail solution. By replicating data from an active server to a passive server through a unique cloning process, Neverfail Heartbeat enables Neverfail products to provide a comprehensive high availability solution for disaster recovery, business continuity and continuous data protection
- Neverfail SCOPE - Neverfail Server Check Optimisation Performance Evaluation (SCOPE) is the only high availability and disaster recovery product on the market today that proactively addresses reliability for Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 servers
- Neverfail application modules - Cluster-class high availability and disaster recovery for Windows-based applications
- Neverfail application module extensions - to protect virtually any Windows-based auxiliary application, including anti-virus, archiving, back-up, anti-Spam and fax products
- Neverfail low bandwidth module – provides exceptional reduction of data transmission in a LAN or a WAN environment
- Neverfail data rollback module – provides rapid restoration of an application to an earlier point in time
To find out more how Neverfail can provide you with a cost-effective and efficient high availability solution, please contact us at this address: nburrell@nviron.co.uk
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