The Top 10 Questions You Should Consider When Evaluating a High Availability Solution
It's not easy to separate hype from reality. When evaluating a high availability and disaster recovery solution, consider these questions to determine the best solution for you.
Will the solution:
- perform a failover that is transparent to the user — meaning users do not have to reboot their workstation or restart their application?
- check the overall health of the server prior to installation to ensure ongoing server reliability?
- feature an installation process that does not require the failover server to be manually pre-configured?
- offer complete data protection — ensure both the data and the registry can be rolled back?
- protect from all types of failures, including failures caused by:
- data corruption or data loss
- operating system performance
- network issues
- hardware issues
- work in a WAN environment to protect from complete site failure?
- offer both a manual and automatic failover/failback by the click of a single button?
- be easy to maintain — what IT resources are required during upgrades, failovers and switchbacks?
- protect the primary application (e.g. Exchange) AND the auxiliary applications “out-of-the-box”, such as anti-virus, archiving, back-up, anti-spam, and fax products?
- allow for comprehensive failover testing — including the application, Active Directory, DNS updates and network connectivity?
If YES is not the answer to every question, there are better high availability and disaster recovery alternatives.
Your ideal solution:
- performs a failover that is non-visible and non-disruptive to the end-user.
- conducts a full diagnosis on the server configuration environment and provides recommendations to ensure a reliable server environment is in place prior to installing a high availability solution.
- ensures an efficient installation process that eliminates the need to pre-configure the failover server with the same applications, directory locations and settings as the production server.
- offers data protection that not only rolls back the data but the entire application state, as “rewinding” back to a data point that is inconsistent with the registry results in unusable configuration and data.
- protects from downtime regardless of failure type.
- works in a LAN or WAN environment and offers data compression.
- allows for manual and automatic failover/failback through a single button click and does so seamlessly without disruption to the end user.
- requires minimal IT skills to manage and operate; fully automated, yet gives IT administrators control and flexibility.
- provides complete “out-of-the-box” protection for primary and auxiliary applications, without the need to write custom scripts in order to protect these applications, both at installation time and in the future as the application profile changes.
- has the ability for comprehensive testing off all critical failover considerations beyond just the application.