Exchange protection software debuts

The Neverfail Group, a company that got its start as a disaster recovery consultancy in the early 1990s, has begun selling software designed to ensure that Microsoft Exchange servers stay up and running.

Neverfail for Exchange lets two servers work together to create a real-time, duplicate copy of messaging data. One server watches the other via software called Neverfail Heartbeat. If the watched server should fail or look as if it is going to, Neverfail's software steps in and creates a duplicate of all the data, applications and operating systems on the secondary server. With this approach, users might not be aware that they are working on a different physical server, Neverfail says.

Craig Foss, IT director for Mattress Discounters in Upper Marlboro, Md., uses Neverfail to protect his Exchange server.

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The Neverfail Group, a company that got its start as a disaster recovery consultancy in the early 1990s, has begun selling software designed to ensure that Microsoft Exchange servers stay up and running.

Neverfail for Exchange lets two servers work together to create a real-time, duplicate copy of messaging data. One server watches the other via software called Neverfail Heartbeat. If the watched server should fail or look as if it is going to, Neverfail's software steps in and creates a duplicate of all the data, applications and operating systems on the secondary server. With this approach, users might not be aware that they are working on a different physical server, Neverfail says.

Craig Foss, IT director for Mattress Discounters in Upper Marlboro, Md., uses Neverfail to protect his Exchange server.

"Our Exchange server going down was what prompted our research into failover products to begin with. We were looking for a failover solution, so that if our primary e-mail server went down, e-mail for the company would continue to flow," he says.

Foss says he couldn't afford the cost of clustering his servers or remote vaulting services to achieve high availability.

Neverfail is focusing exclusively on the Windows server market. The company also has fault-tolerant application modules for SQL Server, SharePoint, Internet Information Server and Microsoft file servers. It has software for applications such as IBM's WebSphere MQ that run on Windows servers.

Neverfail sells all its application modules with a software product called Server Check Optimization Performance Evaluation (SCOPE), which monitors a network before Neverfail installation for potential bottlenecks or failures.

The company's products compete with NSI Software and LiveVault, and with clustering software from Microsoft and PolyServe.

Neverfail for Exchange starts at $6,500. This price includes Neverfail Heartbeat, the Neverfail for Exchange module and SCOPE analysis. Other application modules cost $1,100 per processor.

Click to see: Neverfail for Exchange

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