Neverfail has today announced its ClusterProtector product for Microsoft Windows failover clustering is in beta.
Due to be made available within the next 60 days, the latest addition to the Neverfail Continuous Availability suite is also being launched alongside Neverfail version 5.4, which supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and is being tested with the latest version of Hyper-V.
Andrew Barnes, Neverfail senior vice president of corporate development told IT PRO clusters typically have two points of failure: the storage area network (SAN) or the physical environment that hosts it.
"ClusterProtector allows for our disaster recovery protection to extend the cluster out to a remote location that constantly replicates the data and monitors the environment," he said.
Through intelligent monitoring of the cluster, Neverfail ClusterProtector can proactively distinguish whether the cluster itself can handle a node failure or whether failover to the disaster site is necessary. "Only when the cluster 'dies,' which may come from a power outage affecting the SAN or a fire or flood type of risk to the data centre, does ClusterProtector initiate failover," added Barnes.
He also said he expected uptake of the such functionality to accompany its use by IT organisations looking to take advantage of version 5.4's support for Windows Server 2008 and its hypervisor component, Hyper-V in experiment with different virtualisation products in their IT environments.
Neverfail ClusterProtector will be available for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. And it will be demonstrated at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2008 conference, taking place in Florida, 10 to 13 June.
