CA XOsoft High Availability Solution Suite

CA XOsoft High Availability (formerly CA XOsoft WANSyncHA) is a business continuity solution based on asynchronous real-time replication and automated application failover and failback to provide cost-effective business continuity and distaster recovery for file servers and other application servers on both 32- and 64 bit Windows servers.

CA XOsoft High Availability offers push-button or fully automatic failover of mission-critical servers over a LAN or WAN, server status monitoring, and integrated continuous data protection as a guard against data corruption, all in a system that sets the standard for ease of configuration and management.

When disaster strikes, whether in the form of a hurricane, a blackout, or far more likely, a virus attack or software or user error, your ability to respond well to the crisis can make the difference between a bright future and the end of your business. At the very least, you are likely to incur significant costs in lost business and, perhaps more importantly, lost confidence by your customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Disaster recovery planning is not just about insurance. It is about maintaining your competitive edge.

CA XOsoft High Availability automatic failover software is designed to give you that edge.

• What differentiates CA XOsoft High Availability automatic failover from competitive products?
• What's new?
• Advanced discussion of CA XOsoft Product Architecture

CA XOsoft High Availability, a Solution that offers True Business Continuity

CA XOsoft High Availability is a business continuity solution that integrates several technologies to provide continuous availability of your mission-critical file and application servers through a wide range of disruptions from server failure to data corruption to the loss of an entire site.

CA XOsoft High Availability business continuity provides:

• Asynchronous host-based software replication that transfers changes to data as they occur to a standby replica server located locally or over the WAN
• Automatic monitoring of your production server, including both server availability and the customizable checks of application services and data
• Push-button or auto-triggered automatic failover of all users to a standby server, which may be on the same network or across a WAN at an arbitrarily distant site
• Push-button or automatic failover back to the original server when ready
• Integrated continuous data protection (CDP) for recovery from data corrupted by virus action or user or application error
• Tailored support for file servers and customizable for other applications
• A CDP Repository with full text searching capability give end users control to recover important data quickly without placing the burden on IT administrators
• With the New Centralized Manager you have greater operational control by allowing you to manage all your replication/failover scenario configurations for your entire environment from a single console
• Bandwidth benchmarking assessment mode allows you to estimate bandwidth requirements prior to the deployment of any replication scenario. This gives you greater cost control by knowing exactly what your requirements are so that you can purchase only the bandwidth you need to meet your business needs
• Unique ease of installation with no application or user downtime, automated remote installation, and wizard-driven creation of new high availability scenarios

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Other Resources

Learn more about our automatic failover high availability solution by downloading a trial evaluation of the production version of our software. Our white paper Business and IT Requirements for High Availability, will help to complete your high availability / automatic failover research.

Read about the 5 key principles that guide the design of CA XOsoft High Availability and all of CA XOsoft's products.

Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our automatic failover solution or contact us for information related to your specific business continuity needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the difference between CA XOsoft Replication (formerly CA XOsoft WANSync) and CA XOsoft High Availability?
• Does CA XOsoft High Availability support cluster configurations?
• How much bandwidth do I need?

The CA XOsoft High Availability Advantage

CA XOsoft High Availability delivers significant benefits that enable reduced cost and complexity, significantly broader and deeper protection against a wide variety of potential disruptions, and support that allows your business to become much more proactive in handling both crisis situations and planned downtime. Major benefits of CA XOsoft High Availability include:

Broader Protection for Reduced Vulnerability

Effective protection is not about having a single technology, but about layering solutions to provide protection against the full range of types of failures. CA XOsoft High Availability automatic failover works with the other critical components of your business continuity system, like clustering, backup and snapshot technologies, and then itself adds several key technologies to address a broad range of potential threats. Remember: anything that keeps your business from doing what it does is a disaster, whether that is a flood, virus, or bug in your server software. CA XOsoft High Availability enhances your ability to respond, and therefore your ability to provide continuous, reliable service to your customers.

• Automatic failover across LAN or WAN protects against storage failure on a cluster or standalone system as well as loss of an entire site
• "Soft" installation allows software to be deployed without server reboots or application service restarts — which means no downtime is required to deploy the solution
• Real-time replication minimizes potential data loss
• Integrated continuous data protection (CDP) ensures recovery even when data becomes corrupted
• Production server monitoring ensures that failures are detected quickly, allowing you to respond quickly

Increased Productivity Through Automatic Failover for Effective Business Continuity

In the end, the purpose of a business continuity solution is productivity: to ensure that your people and your business are able to continue operating during and after a disaster. CA XOsoft High Availability ensures this through consistent use of automation throughout the operation of the product, increasing the productivity of your system administrator through ease of configuration and management and of your users through decreased application downtime.

• Fully automatic failover or user triggered, single-click failover reduce the time that users are unable to work
• Fully automated push-button failback when your production system is ready avoids cumbersome reconfiguration and additional downtime
• Simple file browser interface and auto-configuration of appropriate file server settings means minimal administrator time to configure your high availability solution
• Intuitive GUI for central management of all business continuity scenarios maximizes administrator productivity
• Support for scenario templates and support for configuration changes to multiple scenarios at once increase productivity and reduce errors
• Clean push-button failover and failback facilitates regular testing
• Remote installation wizard and zero-downtime installation minimize demands on IT staff and impact on users

True Business Continuity with Reduced Complexity and Cost

It is important that the expense in money and time of purchasing, installing and managing your business continuity solution be commensurate with the potential cost that you are protecting against. Some systems truly require the tremendous expense and complexity of the very highest-end high availability solutions, but most applications can trade a few extra seconds during an automatic failover for dramatically reduced up front and total costs.

• Tailored support for critical file servers means dramatically reduced time to deploy
• Hardware and platform-independent software approach provides a true high availability solution at significantly lower cost
• Automation and intuitive interface reduce administrator time for lower TCO
• Real-time asynchronous replication offers continuous protection over cost-effective networks
• Single point of management and monitoring reduces management complexity.
• Clear scenario status indicators and multiple alert paths ensure that issues requiring action are identified quickly
• Support for scenario templates and support for configuration changes to multiple scenarios at once increase productivity and reduce errors
• Has no hidden costs — does not require advanced OS editions or third-party clustering solutions
• Clean push-button failover and failback facilitates regular testing
• Easily combines with virtual server technologies for reduced cost and complexity (see our solution paper Consolidation of Disaster Recovery Replica Servers: WANSync and Virtual Server Technologies)
• Scheduled bandwidth throttling reduces impact on production environment
• Assessment mode measures exact change rate during evaluation to aid in estimating bandwidth requirements

Increased Flexibility to Fit Your High Availability Solution Needs and Environment

CA XOsoft High Availability solution is designed to be an out-of-the-box solution for realistic environments, but also provides support for you to customize to fit your needs, so that you are free to do effective disaster recovery planning for your business.

• Supports both standalone servers and MSCS clusters
• Integrated with standard Windows security
• Supports both scheduled and continuous replication modes
• Supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows OS
• Works "out of the box," but allows customization as well.
• Alerts and status messages may be sent by email, system logs, or the WANSync management GUI
• Supports bandwidth throttling at a constant level or varying according to a specified schedule
• Statistics may be displayed in the GUI, emailed as reports, or integrated with a database
• Can be combined with virtual server technologies for reduced cost and complexity (see our solution paper Consolidation of Disaster Recovery Replica Servers: WANSync and Virtual Server Technologies)

Extending CA XOsoft High Availability to New Applications

Application-specific versions of CA XOsoft High Availability support the ability to monitor application services, to start and stop services during failover or failback, to check which server is currently active and which passive, and to redirect users from one server to another. For supported applications like SQL, Exchange, IIS and Oracle, all of these capabilities are built into the product and available out-of-the-box. In addition, however, for every single one of these actions it is possible to register a user-defined script which can replace those in the application-specific versions, building on CA XOsoft High Availability Option for File Server (formerly CA XOsoft WANSyncHA Server), if no supported application is involved, or on one of the application specific platforms. An excellent example of this is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. By properly configuring the master and replica servers and registering just four simple scripts you have a tailored high availability solution for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

High Availability Solution — How Much Availability is Enough?

The ability of a business to cope with disasters has always been important. As the use of information technology to fuel business processes has grown, so too have the needs for collateral technologies to ensure that the data and applications that underlie these processes can be brought back online within a reasonable time.

What has changed, however, is the amount of downtime that modern businesses can tolerate and the extent to which their processes depend critically on IT infrastructure support. No longer is it sufficient for most business to be up again within a few days or even a few hours. And no longer is last night's backup sufficient. Many businesses today need to be able to switch to backup systems within minutes and to keep data losses to within just the last few transactions.

That is the kind of high availability solution that CA XOsoft High Availability provides.

When disaster strikes and critical servers go down, just having backups or standby replica servers may not be enough. What is needed is the capacity for rapid and automatic failover to servers that have up-to-the-minute data so that users can just keep working.

High Availability Solution For Critical Applications

CA XOsoft High Availability solution for business continuity with automatic failover ensures that should a critical server become unavailable — due to failure or maintenance-related downtime — a replica will immediately provide service in its place without the need for time-consuming manual procedures or, even worse, reconfiguration of client machines. Easy to say, but any administrator who has had to carry such a procedure out for a modern file or application server well knows that it is not easy to do.

CA XOsoft High Availability provides a tailored, out-of-the-box automatic failover solution for critical industry-standard applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle databases, IIS for Microsoft web servers, and File Server for tailored file server support as well as customizable protection for other application servers.

CA XOsoft High Availability — a High Availability Solution with Automatic Failover

CA XOsoft High Availability extends the CA XOsoft Replication platform for host-based asynchronous replication over LAN or WAN, and enhances it to provide a true high availability solution with application-aware monitoring and automatic failover, even across IP networks.

CA XOsoft High Availability builds on CA XOsoft Replication's ability to maintain standby replicas of complete database and application servers. These synchronized servers may be local to the organization, but may also be maintained remotely, with real-time replication over the WAN ensuring that the information on the standby servers is only seconds behind the production system. Should a server fall prey to unexpected failure or be brought down for maintenance, a synchronized replica, regardless of where it is located in the world, can automatically and instantaneously be brought on-line to maintain high availability, with no need for laborious manual procedures.

Failover may be triggered automatically, or CA XOsoft High Availability can be configured to alert the appropriate administrator who can trigger an automated failover with a simple push of a button. When the production server is available again, failback is equally simple — a push of a button. The entire process takes only a few minutes — at most the time required to stop and start application services on the servers involved.

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You can find more detailed technical information on CA XOsoft High Availability and the architectures that support it in our accompanying advanced discussion of replication, high availability and automated testing technology. An even more in-depth discussion for those who really wish to understand the underlying technology is available in our advanced architecture overview white paper, Disaster Recovery and High Availability with WANSync: An Architectural Overview.

Gain a better understanding of the CA XOsoft business continuity and high availability products by downloading a trial evaluation of our production software. Download our Business and IT Requirements for High Availability, white paper as a resource for your high availability / automatic server failover research.

Be sure to view our library of recorded webcasts and demos pertaining to our high availability solution or contact us for information related to your specific business continuity needs.