* Neverfail launches server failover products
“Users should always have access to their applications – they should never fail.” That is the motto of The Neverfail Group, whose software ensures that application and file servers stay up.
The Neverfail Group, based in Austin, Texas, has quietly introduced software for Windows environments that protects the servers against failure. Founded in 1993 as a group of disaster recovery consultants, the company introduced its first software in 2003.
Called Neverfail for Exchange, the software allows two servers to work together to create a real-time, duplicate image of Exchange data, applications and operating systems.
Both servers run software called Neverfail Heartbeat. If the watched or primary server should fail or look as if it is going to fail, the Neverfail software steps in and creates a duplicate of all data, applications and operating systems on the secondary server. IT then has the option of restarting the primary server or shifting operations over to the secondary server. Using this approach, users may not be even aware that they are working on a different physical server.
Craig Foss, IT director for Mattress Discounters in Upper Marlboro, Md., was looking for software that allowed him to keep access to his Exchange application up. He had suffered a failure of the server and a bunch of unhappy users.
“What prompted our research into failover products to begin with was our Exchange server going down,” Foss says.
Foss wasn’t able to afford the cost of clustering his servers with Microsoft Cluster Services. He also couldn’t afford outsourcing the remote replication of data via a service provider.
So he searched the Internet for a failover package and found that Neverfail could do the job. While deploying Neverfail for Exchange required Foss to add a second Exchange server to his network, Foss says it is a product that performs just as the company said it would.
“We had another failure about 10 days ago with the Neverfail product in place,” Foss says. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It worked perfectly. We didn’t receive a single phone call from users.”
The Neverfail Group also has products for other Windows applications such as SQL Server, Sharepoint, Internet Information Server and Microsoft file servers.
The company sells all its software application modules with a product called Server Check Optimization Performance Evaluation (SCOPE), which watches the network prior to Neverfail installation for potential bottlenecks or failures, and then provides information on the running state of a server and gives recommendations on how it could run better. After optimizing server operations, one of the Neverfail application modules is installed.
Neverfail for Exchange starts at $6,500. This price includes Neverfail Heartbeat, the Neverfail for Exchange module and a SCOPE analysis. The products are available now. Each other application module is available for $1,100 per processor.
