Solutions from Moose Logic

High Availability Solutions

High Availability and Disaster Recovery are often discussed together, in part because many of the components that help provide an HA solution also play a role in a DR solution. For example, a SAN storage solution is a component of a High Availability server virtualization solution, because it makes it easy for a virtual guest to be moved from one virtualization host to another, and, should its current host fail, be quickly restarted on a surviving host. At the same time, most SAN solutions also can replicate data to an off-site location, which is a key component of most Disaster Recovery solutions. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use "High Availability" to refer to solutions that keep critical services running with little or no interruption in the event of a system failure, and "Disaster Recovery" to refer to solutions that will allow the business to survive a catastrophic failure of multiple systems or even the entire data center.

Here are just a few of the High Availability solutions we offer:

• Virtualization - as mentioned above, in a properly architected virtualized infrastructure, virtual machines can be quickly restarted on a surviving virtualization host if the host they are running on should fail. With the proper design, that process can be automated, so that your most critical VMs are automatically restarted on a surviving host.
• Microsoft Cluster Services - For cluster-aware applications such as Exchange or SQL, a Microsoft Cluster can provide protection against hardware failure...although managing the cluster brings added complexity to the environment.
• Marathon everRun MX - provides non-stop operation of critical Windows workloads that require up to 8 virtual processors. With everRun MX, your systems will compute through a system failure without missing a beat, rather than having to wait for a reboot or failover process to complete.
• Replication technologies such as Double-Take, where data is replicated from a source server to a target server that can take over the workload if the source should fail.

The key to crafting the right HA solution is to understand the cost of downtime. If you know what it costs the organization when a critical system goes off line, it's much easier to craft a cost-effective HA solution (and sell it to your management). And, of course, we're here to help you sort through the options and find the one that fits.