Neverfail Scenarios And Advantages 20060217

Unique aspects of Neverfail in various scenarios and cases Neverfail is more than just replication or clustering software. It delivers, in a single package, high-availability, disaster-recovery, application and system performance monitoring, data replication, data snapshot and backup and recovery functions. Neverfail alone, among all HA and DR products on the market, offers these important advantages. 1. Lower Costs Neverfail does not require Enterprise Windows Server edition and Enterprise Editions of applications. This reduces total costs tremendously. Integration and maintenance is simple, freeing up valuable time of administrators and users. 2. Prevent and Minimize Downtime Neverfail prevents and minimizes downtime by incorporating a range of functions not found in other high availability and data replication products. Unlike other technologies on the market, Neverfail proactively monitors the system at all levels, including hardware, software and OS, and pre-emptively corrects errors, thus helping to avoid expensive downtime. 3. Prevent Application Failures It is the only true high availability solution that can monitor applications on a granular level based on their specific characteristics. For instance, it can monitor Exchange servers’ SMTP service, more than just looking at service states but also the SMTP queue length with a simple interface for users to set thresholds for notification, restart of service or switchover. 4. Shortest Failover time to users (refer to Network World independent tests) Near-seamless access to users during failover - because of its design, which creates REDUNDANT IDENTICAL SERVERS (even with dissimilar hardware). After a failover has occurred, users do not need to relongin to the server, update the active directory, rename the machines or reboot. 5. Detect Hardware Failures Neverfail monitors and detects hardware failures such as CPU, RAM, motherboard and network connection, and automatically notifies the administrator and performs failovers in case of failure. 6. Handle OS hangs and Crashes Neverfail not only monitors the environment, it also tries to prevent OS crashes. It does not wait till an OS crash occurs and then fail over. Instead, it automatically tries to repair problems before they cause a failover. 7. Performance Monitoring Neverfail is unlike all other clusters, which monitor only the heartbeat (ping). Neverfail continuously monitors a system’s performance through Windows WMI’s (Windows Management Instrumentation). This helps to prevent lack of a response from a system, and automatically fixes problems, which ensure that users are able to get service replies from the server at all times.

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8. Prevents Downtime Due To Memory Leaks By monitoring resources like RAM, paging file size etc, Neverfail prevents downtime from crashes due to memory leaks, which can be common in a Windows environment. 9. Split-brain prevention In clustering and especially in WAN deployments, when there are false failovers due to network congestion etc, splitbrain (two servers thinking they are active at the same time) can cause serious data contention and problems. Neverfail employs a number of different operations to prevent split-brain from occurring. 10. Provides Disaster Recovery and WAN Support - with no separate product purchase required With the standard Neverfail product, in addition to switch-over and failover functions, you also get disasterrecovery. It provides system monitoring of the application, OS and hardware through all kinds of WAN links. 11. Data Backup and Restoration Through continuous replication and system snapshots, Neverfail give you redundant data on two or more servers. This provides data backup, and allows you to restore data to a previous state instantaneously. . 12. Rollback from Viruses and Data Corruptions In the event of infection from viruses or data corruption, you can rollback BOTH the OS and the application data to a previous state. 13. Automatic Configuration and discovery With other solutions, you must manually configure the data that needs to be protected. But with Neverfail, when new data is introduced, or even when an entire new database is added, the system automatically discovers the new data and updates the other servers. 14. System Reliability With other solutions, you must manually configure the data that needs to be protected. But with Neverfail, when new data is introduced, or even when an entire new database is added, the system automatically discovers the new data and updates the other servers. 15. Scalability – Cascading Neverfail supports more than two servers. You can add more servers in the future to achieve additional redundancy and disaster recovery in a scale-out manner. 16. Hardware Support Neverfail is hardware agnostic – that is, it supports any server make and model, even between pairs of servers. 17. Support virtually any application On natively supported tested applications, no configuration is needed during setup. For other applications, support is simple.

Providence Solutions Singapore Tel: (65) 6482-6302 Malaysia Tel (603) 7725-4850 Hong Kong Tel: (852) 8199-0039