Neverfail aims to protect critical applications under vSphere 5 with Virtual Availability Director tool

Neverfail is updating its high-availability platform with Virtual Availability Director (VAD), a tool that integrates with VMware's vSphere to give administrators a single view of their critical business applications protected by Neverfail across both physical and virtual infrastructure.

Set to be available in November, VAD provides a rich interface for managing availability of all business applications running on Windows Server, and builds on Neverfail's server protection technology, which maintains secondary backup systems and oversees handover when necessary.

VAD integrates tightly into VMware's vCenter console on vSphere 5 as a plug-in to provide a single overview of all applications and the infrastructure they depend on, both physical and virtual, according to the firm.

"If you‘ve got physical servers that you need to protect you can see their availability but you can also see all of your business applications and their components," said Paddy Falls, chief technology officer at Neverfail.

This allows the administrator to pull together multiple Exchange and BlackBerry servers into a single business view that customers might call "messaging", for example, and then manage availability at this level or at the level of any of the components.

"They can see whether the whole application is available, or if any of the components have failed, in which case they can switch the individual component over to a backup. If the whole application fails, then we can switch the whole application over to a different datacentre," Falls explained.

According to Neverfail, it is commonplace now for customers to use VMware to host secondary backups for physical servers, and VAD is the only tool that can give a complete overview of the whole stack from a single console.

This tight integration is possible because of the enhanced vCenter added to vSphere 5, Falls said.

"VMware is trying to move vCenter on from managing just the virtual infrastructure to allow administrators to start managing other things within that framework, and that allows partners like us to provide a much more in-depth view," he said.

This move fits with the way that IT administrator roles are evolving as virtual infrastructure and cloud platforms become more central to enterprise computing, according to Neverfail.

"A virtual administrator is a relatively new type of IT role that over time will expand. Typically they have been just managing virtual machines, now they are having to deal with storage integration and managing storage, especially with vSphere 5," Falls said.

Virtual Availability Director will be provided free of charge to all existing Neverfail customers, he added.