Neverfail IT Continuity Engine is comprised of several interrelated concepts and components that work in harmony to provide supreme levels of continuous availability and protection from a broad range of failures. The architecture outlines the key logical components of a single instance of Neverfail IT Continuity Engine.
Neverfail’s IT Continuity Engine keeps your applications continuously available. This means there will be no user downtime for applications protected by Neverfail, period. To do this, Engine protects businesses from the broadest possible range of threats.
Failures are more likely caused by software defects or operator error than hardware. 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 react to failure, IT Continuity Engine protects applications proactively – before a failure ever occurs.
Neverfail IT Continuity 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 rule-based system that identifies potential application failure signatures in real time before a failure actually occurs and determines what remediation actions and escalations to take.
Every application that fails fails in its own unique way. Neverfail provides a range of plug-ins for common infrastructure and applications from vendors such as VMware and Microsoft. These plug-ins contain the intelligence to identify when any given component is likely to fail. Engine 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 the IT Continuity Engine’s state-of-the-art protection.
The most important assets requiring protection are the application’s files and databases. Engine 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, Engine can automatically perform a fully automated failover, typically in less than one minute, to restore application services to production. The Engine’s data replication can also be configured to keep either one or two hot-standby systems continuously synchronized with the production application. In this fashion, local failures may be resolved with failover to a local hot-standby instance, while site-level outages trigger failover to a remote disaster recovery instance. Once problems with the production system have been resolved, failback is also a fully automated and non-disruptive activity.
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 IT Continuity Engine 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? Engine works consistently across any hypervisor and any physical server and with no dependencies on shared storage, so there’s no single point of failure. Need to protect a Hyper-V VM using a vSphere failover? Not a problem. Engine can protect your critical applications wherever they reside so they’re always available for production
