* Window sticker printer bets on fault-tolerant system
Eric Mynster was faced with a problem. As corporate IT manager for Ancor Information Systems, the Troy, Mich. supplier of customized print and electronic document services, Mynster had servers he needed to protect and make sure they were always available to meet the service-level agreements he had set for customer Ford Motor Company.
Ancor, provides clients such as Ford with the ability to view online files for automobile window stickers and any type of paper label that goes into a vehicle. The company prints as many as 60,000 to 100,000 VIN-specific documents for Ford each day.
“One of the services we provide to our clients is online PDF viewing for window stickers, bills, policies, etc.,” says Mynster. “In particular, Ford Motor Company wanted to take a look at the labels and verify quality and what not.”
Ford also wanted to have any of its customer who was considering buying a vehicle to be able to view the window sticker online. And that meant that Ancor’s servers needed to be available 24/7/365.
To meet the SLA Mynster had set for Ford, he installed software on the servers from the Neverfail Group that allowed the servers to failover to secondary hot standby servers if problems occurred.
“We took our current system in place and made a clone of it, expanded it so it had more horsepower and we went with the Neverfail option to provide redundancy for all the servers,” says Mynster. “We had an SLA that specified that if any one server rebooted once a month, we would fall out of SLA.”
Mynster installed Neverfail on six servers and put six standby servers in place.
The software ‘kicks in’ and fails the primary server over to the secondary servers. “We have had Neverfail failover three times in the past year,” says Mynster. “Each time it has worked as expected and we haven’t had any downtime.”
The Neverfail Group has software for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Microsoft file servers, as well as for BlackBerry, Lotus Domino and VMware servers.
