Wednesday 30 January 2008

Frequently Asked Questions on Server Recovery

How does Server Recovery Help?
The solution provides automated failover of any application on Windows and Linux. The failover can be on a LAN or a WAN environment. When failover occurs, it can notify you via email or text to inform you what has happened.

How does the solution work on a WAN?

The LAN and WAN solutions work in exactly the same way. However, for a WAN solution external factors such as bandwidth need to be taken into account.

How does the replication work?
The replication works at block level, as one data block is changed, it is copied to the backup server. Are there mechanisms to minimize the traffic on the network? There are various ways that the traffic on the network is reduced. For example, white space is not replicated, various levels of compression can be set, or asynchronous replication can be used. For more details, refer to the documentation or contact us.

How do the licences work?
The software is licenced on a per server basis. It is independent of the number of CPU’s or the underlying OS. Each product is licenced separately. You will require a combination of Data Replication, the LifeKeeper core software and a number of application recovery kits, which have been written to monitor

Do I need hardware to be the same?
The LifeKeeper solution works with dissimilar hardware. However, it does require the operating system to be the same on both the active and standby servers.

Do I need shared storage?
Although it works with shared storage, this is not a requirement. Where there is no shared storage between the two servers, data replication is used to provide an up-to-date copy of the data on the bakup server.

I have non standard applications that I need to recover can you help?

Openminds can recover any application with out customization kit, this will allow you to put in the start and stop scripts for your application and the rest of the monitoring that uses LifeKeeper is generated from these.