Neverfail Launches vAppHA for vSphere 4

Neverfail Group Limited announced Neverfail vAppHA, a new product that demoed at VMworld 2009.

Neverfail’s unique application-aware availability framework has established itself as the protection tool of choice for continuous availability of Tier-1 Microsoft applications. vAppHA integrates this same technology with VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware VMotion, components of VMware vSphere 4, to help ensure the deepest level of protection against application outages. vAppHA continuously monitors and analyzes the health and state of Tier-1 applications running within virtual machines. If vAppHA detects availability or performance issues with applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server databases, it uses the VMware vSphere 4 APIs to restart the virtual machine or migrate it to a different host using VMware VMotion.

"Organizations making significant investments in VMware vSphere 4 are looking for assurance that Tier-1 applications will be continuously available," said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail. "Application issues are a major cause of business interruption so vAppHA integrates Neverfail’s unique application-aware approach with VMware vSphere 4 infrastructure availability tools. By detecting application failures and working with VMware VMotion to rectify the situation, business disruption is avoided long before recovery is required. This combination provides the broadest protection for customers who have deployed Tier-1 workloads on VMware vSphere 4, or who may be contemplating a migration of such workloads into VMware vSphere 4 from a physical platform."

Benefits and features of Neverfail vAppHA include:

• Integrated with VMware vSphere 4 – Neverfail vAppHA integrates with VMware HA and VMware VMotion to protect businesses against the impact of application-level and host-level failures.
• Automatic switchover – Neverfail vAppHA automatically works with VMware vSphere 4 to switch application services over to other servers to avoid application downtime when an application failure or outage is detected.
• Protection across all layers – Neverfail vAppHA detects and remediates issues at the application eco-system level by leveraging Neverfail’s existing set of application plug-ins.  In the integrated solution, VMware vSphere 4 provides protection from infrastructure failures with Neverfail extending the benefits of VMware’s high availability technologies to protect against application failures.
• Low TCO – Neverfail provides a low total cost of ownership while delivering the widest scope of protection for businesses. Availability rules and policies for Tier-1 Microsoft applications, such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, and RIM’s BlackBerry infrastructure, come pre-configured, eliminating the need for manual configuration.

"VMware vSphere 4 is well-known for its resiliency and reliability, and we are delighted to see Neverfail integrate with and extend these qualities to the applications layer," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "VMware VMotion, VMware HA and VMware Fault Tolerance provide protection against planned and unplanned downtime due to hardware or operating system maintenance or failures. Solutions like Neverfail vAppHA are designed to help customers further extend these availability features of VMware vSphere 4 to business-critical applications."

Neverfail vAppHA will be available in Q4 2009.