Neverfail introduces central console for failover protection

Neverfail manages failover for business-critical systems

Neverfail has introduced a central management console designed to give administrators an at-a-glance overview of all Neverfail systems operating within their infrastructure, and the services these are protecting.

Available immediately, the Neverfail Continuous Availability Director enables a business-centric view of high availability and disaster recovery across an organisation's infrastructure.

The tool, which forms part of an update to the Neverfail version 6 platform, is needed because key business applications are often now dependant on multiple datacentre services, and could be affected by the failure of any single service.

"The definition of business services is changing. You might have a corporate web site built on SharePoint, but SharePoint depends on SQL Server, and if either of them goes down, so does your site," said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail.

Continuous Availability Director provides a business-level view that lets administrators see the status of application servers and their interdependencies, and take control from a single place, according to Neverfail.

"It's about looking at IT services as a business application, not just managing services in isolation," said Barnes.

Furthermore, some services might be designed to failover to an off-site backup if they fall below a certain quality threshold, and this could have an impact on the performance of on-site systems that are still functioning.

"The end users may not notice if a background service is failing, but the administrator will get an alert and can decide to failover completely to the off-site backup," Barnes said.

Neverfail products are available to manage failover for Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, SQL Server, SharePoint and Windows file servers, among others.

Continuous Availability Director runs from any Windows system such as a laptop, and can be configured to give a different view for administrators covering different areas of the business, according to Neverfail.