Lapeer County With Neverfail

Neverfail Ltd., a software company specializing in continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, announced that Lapeer County, Michigan is using Neverfail to ensure the continuous availability of its critical 911 systems.

Lapeer County, which has a population of 90,000 and covers 663 square miles north of Detroit, worked with VisionAIR to select Neverfail to ensure the availability of critical systems in the event of electrical storms, natural disasters or other catastrophes causing system overloads, failure or outages. Neverfail also protects Lapeer County’s systems during smaller application outages or planned downtime.

During the summer of 2010, a violent electrical storm swept through Lapeer County, and lightning struck the county’s emergency dispatch center and radio tower, knocking out power. Fortunately, the county had uninterruptable power supplies protecting the servers and emergency generators, so it could keep all emergency dispatch applications online.

However, powerful strikes can weaken systems causing them to fail later. The next afternoon, the server responsible for retaining all dispatch records crashed. After several attempts to restore the server were unsuccessful, the county got a spare server to re-install the applications. During the process to rebuild this server and get it back on line, the county’s primary Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) server also failed. The CAD server, running VisionCAD provided by VisionAIR, is a vital link in the provision of emergency services to the public.

Fortunately, the VisionCAD system and Lapeer County’s SQL database were protected against downtime through the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite, which maintained a second copy of the CAD system on an alternative server. Because the software monitors whether systems are working and available, it detected the failure of the primary server and immediately switched CAD operations to the secondary server. As a result, dispatch operations continued uninterrupted, never compromising public safety.

"Had we not installed Neverfail earlier in the year, our dispatchers would have had to manually write out and process each incoming emergency call with pen and paper. This process would have been time consuming and inefficient – severely hindering Lapeer County’s ability to act on emergency calls," said Jeff Satkowski, systems administrator for Lapeer County’s Central Dispatch. "For two weeks, we ran our dispatch services on the backup server, but eventually we were able to get the primary server fully online."

Once Lapeer County got its primary server back up and running, it worked closely with VisionAIR to load software, resynchronize data from the secondary server and then use Neverfail to switch live operations back to the primary system. Since installing Neverfail, Lapeer County conducts monthly tests when it is updating Microsoft Windows servers to make sure the primary server fails over and back seamlessly.

"Any downtime for organizations is simply unacceptable – and in Lapeer County’s case, downtime with its 911 systems could literally mean life or death for someone. The Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite provides an easy, cost-effective way for organizations to ensure uptime during planned or unplanned downtime," said Bob Roudebush, vice president of marketing of Neverfail.