Neverfail's Heartbeat Helps Keep Microsoft Clusters Up

As part of an effort to expand into the U.S. market, UK-based Neverfail Group announced last week Version 4.1 of its Neverfail Heartbeat product suite, a cluster-class, high availability software solution for Microsoft-platform applications.

Heartbeat uses a pair of interconnected redundant servers, configured locally (LAN) or remotely (WAN), to protect against failures due to common faults such as OS, application and site failures, and is targetted at companies ranging from small-to-medium enterprise (SME) through global enterprises.

Neverfail supports Exchange 2000/2003, SQL Server 2000, running on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. In addition to Heartbeat and the Application Modules for Exchange, SQL Server, and File Server, Neverfail has an Application Module Extension Development Kit, which can be used to develop protection for third-party applications.

Features added to the new version, according to Neverfail, include network testing, ensuring the network is up, not just the server, and the application; and "split-brain avoidance" for WAN environments, to ensure that both servers don't ever become active at the same time, if the WAN were to fail.

To avoid/reduce application downtime, Neverfail's Heartbeat performs tasks including:--Monitoring the whole application environment to ensure all components are working,

--Recovering from errors in individual components without the need to failover to a secondary system,

--Replicating the whole application environment, including data, application, system and even registry information to ensure that there is no single point of failure in the solution,

--Switchover in the event of major problem, from a primary server to a secondary in a controlled fashion to ensure no data loss and minimum downtime,

--Failover in the event of a catastrophic failure, rapidly bringing the application up on a secondary server and getting end-users up and running again,--Switchback after a Switchover or Failover recovering back to the original production state without involving manual effort or system outage. Heartbeat is available today. Pricing is per "pair" of servers, starting at $5,000 for the combination of Heartbeat ($4,000) and an Application Module ($1,000), and is based on the server in a pair with the greatest number of CPUs.