100% Uptime is a Reality

It’s not easy to separate hype from reality. When evaluating a high availability and disaster recovery solution, ask vendors these questions to determine the best solution for you.

Will the solution:

• perform a fail over that is transparent to the user – meaning users do not have to reboot their workstation or restart their application?

• check the overall health of the server prior to installation to ensure ongoing server reliability?

• feature an installation process that does not require the fail over server to be manually pre-configured?

• offer complete data protection – ensure both the data and the registry can be rolled back?

• protect from failures caused by the application, data, operating system, network, hardware – and site disasters?

• work in a WAN environment to protect from complete site failure?

• offer both a manual and automatic fail over/fail back?

• be easy to maintain – what IT resources are required during upgrades, fairgoers and switchbacks?

• protect the primary application (e.g. Exchange) AND the auxiliary applications out-of-the-box, such as anti-virus, archiving, back-up, anti-spam, and fax products?

• allow for comprehensive fail over testing – including the application, Active Directory, DNS updates and network connectivity?

If your vendor cannot say YES to every question, there are better high availability and disaster recovery alternatives.

Your ideal solution:

• performs a fail over that is non-visible and non-disruptive to the end-user.

• conducts a full diagnosis on the server configuration environment and provides recommendations to ensure a reliable server environment is in place prior to installing a high availability solution.

• ensures an efficient installation process that eliminates the need to pre-configure the fail over server with the same applications, directory locations and settings as the production server.

• offers data protection that not only rolls back the data but the entire application state, as “rewinding” back to a data point that is inconsistent with the registry results in unusable configuration and data.

• protects from downtime regardless of failure type or physical location.

• works in a LAN and WAN environment and offers data compression.

• allows for manual and automatic fail over/fail back and does so seamlessly without disruption to the end user.

• requires minimal IT skills to manage and operate; fully automated, yet gives IT administrators control and flexibility.

• provides complete out-of-the-box protection for primary and auxiliary applications, without the need to write custom scripts in order to protect these applications, both at installation time and in the future as the application profile changes

• has the ability for comprehensive testing off all critical fail over considerations beyond just the application.