Neverfail upgrade enhances apps management

gallery

Continuous availability and disaster recovery software company Neverfail has today announced application management enhancements to its continuous availability suite.

Neverfail 5.3 includes a new application management framework that is designed to act as a point from which to centralise greater levels of automation and governance and control over the running of mission critical IT systems.

John Morency, research director for analyst firm Gartner said that vendors like Neverfail are fulfilling a niche not yet filled by the bigger IT infrastructure management platforms like HP's OpenView and BMC's Remedy or their storage management software counterparts, such as Veritas.

"We're now seeing the inevitable morph of the traditional disaster recovery and continuity software management market becoming more involved in the management function and move more towards the IT director's domain," he said.

He told IT PRO it is still the IT director's responsibility to manage the underlying components of the IT infrastructure and cost, where products like Neverfail offer additional levels of reporting and automation at a strategic level.

Neverfail said the proactive application monitoring and management capabilities of 5.3 now offers point-and-click customisation that removes time-consuming, cumbersome and complex scripting required by other replication products.

It automates key processes with new self-tuning functionality to automatically detect and configure protection for new data locations and services in real time. And plug-ins enable the adding or upgrading of specific application protection 'on the fly'.

Morency added: "Most IT directors have to play the 80/20 rule, which is to focus on the recovery processes for the most critical applications that have the most important guaranteed recovery times, like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Lotus Domino or BlackBerry servers, for example."

The Neverfail technology clones and then maintains real-time copy of all data and settings of mission-critical applications from a primary server to a secondary server. Version 5.3's framework allows for monitoring of the primary and secondary server to guarantees other activities, like rogue system processes locking access to target files, will not prevent successful data replication, for example.

This monitoring, or 'application intelligence' as Neverfail calls it, is designed to provide root cause analysis and automated corrective action.

By automatically finding and fixing issues before they cause downtime, failover to the secondary server to allow users to continue working without interruption and failback with no need for users to restart any applications, it said the business operations could remain protected, no matter what may affect the environment.

Email to a friend

Print this page