Neverfail set to automatically repair VMware machines

Business continuity software provider Neverfail has unveiled a new tool that it claims quickly repairs faulty applications running on VMware virtual machines.

Neverfail vAppHA uses the company’s Application Management Framework and has integrated this with VMware’s vSphere High Availability and VMware’s VMotion to detect hung or corrupted applications.

The vAppHA then automatically restarts the problem components, application or the whole virtual machine.

“Organisations making significant investments in vSphere are looking for assurance that Tier-1 applications will be continuously available,” said Andrew Barnes, Neverfail senior vice president of corporate development.

Neverfail vAppHA automatically works with vSphere to switch application services over to other servers to avoid application downtime when an application failure or outage is detected.

vAppHA will be available from October this year.

Neverfail has also launched the next generation of its disaster recovery solution, Neverfail 6.0, which it claims integrates high availability and remote recovery.

A component called Neverfail Tertiary will allow three servers to be configured to ensure that localised failures, such as application issues, and external issues, like floods or power outages, will not bring the business down.

The second server will deal with the local failures while the third will deal with remote emergencies, said Barnes. Although companies can make do with just one back-up server, it would need to be positioned remotely in order to take account of external problems and this would mean local issues take longer to resolve, he said.

The Neverfail Tertiary component will automatically manage synchronisation between the sites to enable a seamless switchback when primary systems are restored, the company said.

Additionally, another new module has been added to the solution, called Neverfail WANSmart, which uses de-duplication techniques to reduce the amount of data across networks and remove the need to implement hardware-based WAN acceleration devices.

Neverfail said as much as 30 times bandwidth can be achieved with the module, allowing costly network updates to be avoided.

“As more and more organisations start looking to host applications in the cloud, a potential problem is the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over networks,” said Barnes. “Neverfail 6 overcomes this barrier.”

Neverfail 6 will also hold an updated unified management console, allowing administrators to manage WANSmart and Tertiary options together with pre-configured policies and rules from a single interface.