Blackberrys That Never Fail

Crackberry addicts who can't put their PDAs down can now buy assurance that they'll never have to -- for technical reasons, anyway. Neverfail, Austin, TX, today announced the first-ever failover solution for Blackberry email and mobile data system applications (called Neverfail for Blackberry Enterprise Server). Why didn't such Blackberry backup exist before? "Making applications cluster-aware isn't a simple task," says John Posavatz, vice president, product management at Neverfail Group, Austin, TX. The company partnered with RIM to develop replication and failover for Blackberry applications on a secondary server, and it already offered continuous protection for the Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino servers that often serve Blackberrys. The solution also monitors the servers for clues to potential problems in an effort to fix problems before having to fail over.Neverfail also introduced today a new version of Scope, its server check, optimization and performance evaluation tool for Windows servers. The software now performs frequent server health checks, looking for clues gleaned from a database containing information on past outages, root causes of the problems, and best practices for avoiding the problems. For instance, if a customer puts all Exchange files and log files on the same server (the default setting), Scope will alert IT that it would be better to separate them onto two drives in case one fails.