Neverfail extends the reach of virtualisation

August 27, 2009:Neverfail claims the benefits of virtualisation are now available to applications deployed in physical environments with the launch of vXtender.

Neverfail vXtender ensures the continuous availability of applications that are deployed across multiple production servers through the use of secondary servers running on virtual machines on a single virtual host.

The company says this approach brings the cost benefits of server consolidation for continuous availability and avoids the risks of immediate virtualisation of established critical applications.

“More Australian and New Zealand businesses are looking to harness the value and power of virtualisation, yet the advantages of virtualisation demand that applications are migrated immediately and this may not be appropriate in many situations,” said Nick Ogle, Sales Director for Neverfail Group, Australia and New Zealand.

“With the launch of Neverfail vXtender, we are bringing virtualisation advantages to those applications which will remain deployed on physical servers – dramatically reducing costs and the risks associated with future migration.”

Neverfail vXtender delivers high availability and disaster protection by automating failover of the physical applications to virtual machines on a single virtual host. During the process, users are unaware of the original application failover as the Neverfail software maintains the network identity of the original physical server, ensuring seamless and continuous end-user connection to mission-critical applications.

The virtual host can be deployed locally or remotely, allowing both LAN and WAN deployment options without the need to use specialist shared storage solutions. This approach ensures maximum flexibility for deployment of high availability and disaster recovery solutions to ensure that business critical systems are always on.

Neverfail vXtender includes the following features:

* Automated application failover – Failover of one or more applications from the production server to the virtual host can occur automatically on any failure of the production server;

* High Availability and Disaster Recovery – The standby virtual host can be connected by a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) to the protected production servers;

* Restoring network identity – The network identity of the application virtual machine after failover is the same as the failed production application machine;

* Data rollback – Multiple snapshots of data can be maintained on the standby server and the most appropriate one can be manually selected if required;

* Server consolidation – Server consolidation benefits are extended to enable a single virtual host to protect multiple applications. Many organisations have multiple critical applications that need to stay continuously available and require a standby server to support each. By using the virtualisation benefits of vXtender and server consolidation, multiple physical applications can be protected by a single host running multiple virtual machines;

* Immediate protection and risk-free migration for critical applications – High availability protection for physical applications is provided without requiring applications to be migrated. When required, vXtender can be used to validate the migration process to a virtual environment. With manual switchover and switchback of applications between physical and virtual machines, user access is able to seamlessly continue during migration testing and the ultimate switchover; and

* No investment in shared storage required – The approach of Neverfail vXtender ensures that application availability can be delivered without storage upgrades, saving significant amounts of money.