High availability software supplier Neverfail has come out with a version of its continuity software that works on top of platforms virtualised using VMware’s vSphere cloud operating system.
Due for release by year end, vAppHA continuously monitors and analyses the health and state of applications running within VMware virtual machines, the company said.
If vAppHA detects availability or performance issues with applications, such as Microsoft Exchange or a SQL Server database, it uses the vSphere application programming interfaces (APIs) to restart the virtual machine or migrate it to a different host using VMotion.
“The Neverfail system talks to vSphere and reboots the VM or moves it to another host and reboots it there,” Andrew Barnes, SVP Corporate Development for Neverfail explained to us.
“VMware vSphere High Availability and VMware VMotion do provide some level of protection against application outages, but they can only see that there is a problem with a particular VM, they can’t see inside or what an application is doing.”
The new product “makes a virtual cluster application-aware,” Barnes told us.By detecting application failures and working with VMotion to rectify the situation, business disruption is avoided long before recovery is required.
The product will be sold as an add-on to the core HA platform, which this week is given an update with release 6 of the company flagship including new features dubbed Neverfail Tertiary and Neverfail WANSmart.
WANSmart provides for inline de-duplication of network traffic, something Barnes suggested reduces by 30-fold the amount of traffic being sent across the network during replication. “It means we can provide active disaster recovery over the smallest of WAN links.”
The Neverfail Tertiary line is intended to provide the best of HA and disaster recovery in one system set-up.
The company said that by bringing fully automated, three-tier failover support into a single business continuity platform, Neverfail Tertiary enables a trio of servers to be configured to ensure that localised failures, such as application issues, as well as site-wide issues, such as floods or power outages, will not bring the business down.
Barnes said, “It offers the best of both worlds of HA and DR and means a local HA server is protected also by a remote DR server. The system manages the failover process across local or remote servers, and all possible combinations between them.”
The two product immediately go into general availability.
Companies are increasingly turning to failover protection from the likes of Neverfail as a means of gauranteeing the availability of business systems like email because applications are becoming increasingly business critical.
One of the latest proponents is IMO Precision Controls, which is using the HA software to safeguard its email and incoming order system.
Anthony Keohane, Director of IT said that the business was able to justify the investment in HA because its email system can carry anything up to £50,000 a day in orders.
“The Exchange server isn’t the most critical server in the organisation, but it is a major one in that respect. The way we have set up the system means it is automatically replicated across servers in two adjacent buildings.”
The business has also safe-guarded its back-end server, which is also protected with fail-over mechanisms. “The Pick-based financials system has hot back up. It means we are wholly protected from even the most minor of outages.”
