The Business Requirement

Neverfail’s Heartbeat Failover Engine keeps your applications continuously available. This means there will be no user downtime for applications protected by Neverfail. Period. To do this, Heartbeat protects businesses from the broadest possible range of threats. This requires understanding how and why applications fail - and what to do to mitigate these problems.

The Neverfail Heartbeat Failover Engine logical architecture (Figure 1) outlines the key components of the product. For more information, download the whitepaper Neverfail Heartbeat Failover Engine Architecture.

Proactive Monitoring and Protection

As hardware has become more reliable, failures are more likely caused by software defects or operator error. While components can fail without warning, many application problems can be detected in advance and fixed before they cause downtime. Unlike recovery-based systems which simply to react to failure, Heartbeat Engine protects applications proactively - before a failure ever occurs. Neverfail Heartbeat Failover Engine uses a broad range of instruments to monitor the health of an application eco-system, from the availability, capacity, and consumption of system-level resources to application-level behavior such as response times, service and database availability. These parameters are interpreted by a rules-base system that identifies potential application failure signatures in real time before a failure actually occurs and determines what remediation actions and escalations to take.

Application Plug-ins

Like unhappy families, every application that fails fails in its own unique way. Neverfail provides a range of plug-ins for common Microsoft infrastructure and applications. These plug-ins contain the intelligence to identify when any given component is likely to fail. Heartbeat can also easily be configured to protect custom applications for which no plug-ins is available. In short, any application running on Microsoft Windows can benefit from Heartbeat Engine’s state-of-the-art protection.

Replication, Switchover and Failover

The most important assets requiring protection are the application’s files and databases. Heartbeat protects these through real-time replication of all relevant data including configuration information and registry settings to a hot-standby server that will immediately assume operations if the primary system is compromised for any reason. When a potential application or server error is detected, a set of pre-determined rules are executed which can, for example, be configured to raise system and email alerts and perform a managed switchover to a hot-standby instance before the primary application actually fails. These preventative and protective actions are performed very rapidly and with zero data loss.

Of course, some failures will occur without warning. In this case, Heartbeat will automatically perform a failover - typically less than one minute. To assure continuity, all datasets on the hot-standby system are automatically rolled back to their last consistent point. Neverfail replication can also be configured to keep either one or two hot-standby systems continuously synchronized with the production application, so that local failures may be fixed with failover to a local hot-standby instance, while site-level outages trigger failover to a remote disaster recovery. Once problems with the production system have been resolved, failback is also a fully automated and non-disruptive activity.

Any Application, Any Platform, and No Single Points of Failure

Modern applications can be complex multi-tier, multi-component beasts, and are consequently complex to recover. Taming this complexity is where Neverfail comes in. Since Heartbeat can aggregate any arbitrary set of application components into a single unit for the purpose of failover and failback, multi-tier, multi-component applications can be easily protected. But what if some components are deployed on virtual servers whilst others run on physical servers? Heartbeat works consistently across any hypervisor and any physical server and with no dependencies on shared storage, so there’s no single point of failure. Heartbeat can protect your critical applications wherever they reside so they’re always available.

Neverfail Heartbeat Failover Engine provides Application Continuous Availability for any Windows application. For many major enterprise applications, Neverfail includes plug-ins that make it simple to quickly configure and deploy Heartbeat on those application servers. Any other Windows application can be protected in a few simple steps by configuring Heartbeat to monitor and failover those applications as well.

Plug-ins for the following applications are available for Heartbeat:

• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Microsoft SharePoint Server
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Internet Information Server
• VMware vCenter Server*
• SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor*
• Lotus Domino
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server
• Conceivium MobileMonitor Agent for BlackBerry Enterprise Server
• Good Mobile
• Captaris RightFax Server
• Captaris RightFax Connector for Exchange
• eTrust EZ AntiVirus
• McAfee GroupShield for Lotus Domino
• McAfee GroupShield for Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft Antigen for Exchange
• Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange
• Sophos PureMessage for Exchange
• Symantec Mail Security
• Trend Micro ScanMail

*Neverfail licenses its technology to VMware and SolarWinds. Please contact the respective vendors for pricing and licensing information.