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Product Provides High-availability for SharePoint Environments

The Neverfail Group is shipping its Neverfail high-availability solution for end-to-end support of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server environments.

Neverfail for SharePoint monitors SharePoint Portal Servers, watching for changes in content made by collaborators and other users, and making sure those changes are backed up. Additionally, the product protects all information sharing applications and servers that host SharePoint content, whether it resides in SQL Server, Exchange Public Folders, or on a file system, according to a statement from the Austin, Texas firm.

“If a problem occurs, Neverfail for SharePoint can take a variety of pre-emptive, corrective actions without resorting to a full system failover. In extreme cases, a non-disruptive, seamless failover to your secondary server can occur automatically and transparently to your users,” the company’s statement says.

Based around a “heartbeat” feature that lies at the core of the product, Neverfail continuously replicates changes from the active server to a passive one, which can be located locally or remotely from the active server. In the event that a switchover occurs, when the primary server comes back online, Neverfail automatically resynchronizes the servers and their data.

Upon installation, Neverfail for SharePoint intelligently discovers all application files, registry settings, services and data associated with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and collaborative servers. During operation, it monitors all key applications services and performance attributes of the operating system, the server hardware, and all collaborative servers and can provide proactive, pre-emptive problem resolution short of a failover in many cases, the company says.

Neverfail for SharePoint requires Windows Server 2003 with 2 gigabytes of free hard disk space, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Standard or Enterprise editions, and it also requires two network cards per machine.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.

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