Unique aspects of Neverfail in various scenarios and cases

Neverfail is more than just replication or clustering software. It delivers, in a single package, high-availability,
disaster-recovery, application and system performance monitoring, data replication, data snapshot and backup
and recovery functions. Neverfail alone, among all HA and DR products on the market, offers these important
advantages.

1. Lower Costs

Neverfail does not require Enterprise Windows Server edition and Enterprise Editions of applications. This
reduces total costs tremendously. Integration and maintenance is simple, freeing up valuable time of
administrators and users.

2. Prevent and Minimize Downtime

Neverfail prevents and minimizes downtime by incorporating a range of functions not found in other high
availability and data replication products. Unlike other technologies on the market, Neverfail proactively
monitors the system at all levels, including hardware, software and OS, and pre-emptively corrects errors, thus
helping to avoid expensive downtime.

3. Prevent Application Failures

It is the only true high availability solution that can monitor applications on a granular level based on their
specific characteristics. For instance, it can monitor Exchange servers’ SMTP service, more than just looking at
service states but also the SMTP queue length with a simple interface for users to set thresholds for notification,
restart of service or switchover.

4. Shortest Failover time to users (refer to Network World independent tests)

Near-seamless access to users during failover - because of its design, which creates REDUNDANT
IDENTICAL SERVERS (even with dissimilar hardware). After a failover has occurred, users do not need to re-
longin to the server, update the active directory, rename the machines or reboot.

5. Detect Hardware Failures

Neverfail monitors and detects hardware failures such as CPU, RAM, motherboard and network connection,
and automatically notifies the administrator and performs failovers in case of failure.

6. Handle OS hangs and Crashes

Neverfail not only monitors the environment, it also tries to prevent OS crashes. It does not wait till an OS crash
occurs and then fail over. Instead, it automatically tries to repair problems before they cause a failover.

7. Performance Monitoring

Neverfail is unlike all other clusters, which monitor only the heartbeat (ping). Neverfail continuously monitors a
system’s performance through Windows WMI’s (Windows Management Instrumentation). This helps to prevent
lack of a response from a system, and automatically fixes problems, which ensure that users are able to get
service replies from the server at all times.

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Singapore Tel: (65) 6482-6302 Malaysia Tel (603) 7725-4850 Hong Kong Tel: (852) 8199-0039
8. Prevents Downtime Due To Memory Leaks

By monitoring resources like RAM, paging file size etc, Neverfail prevents downtime from crashes due to
memory leaks, which can be common in a Windows environment.

9. Split-brain prevention

In clustering and especially in WAN deployments, when there are false failovers due to network congestion etc,
splitbrain (two servers thinking they are active at the same time) can cause serious data contention and
problems. Neverfail employs a number of different operations to prevent split-brain from occurring.

10. Provides Disaster Recovery and WAN Support - with no separate product purchase required

With the standard Neverfail product, in addition to switch-over and failover functions, you also get disaster-
recovery. It provides system monitoring of the application, OS and hardware through all kinds of WAN links.

11. Data Backup and Restoration

Through continuous replication and system snapshots, Neverfail give you redundant data on two or more
servers. This provides data backup, and allows you to restore data to a previous state instantaneously. .

12. Rollback from Viruses and Data Corruptions

In the event of infection from viruses or data corruption, you can rollback BOTH the OS and the application
data to a previous state.

13. Automatic Configuration and discovery

With other solutions, you must manually configure the data that needs to be protected. But with Neverfail, when
new data is introduced, or even when an entire new database is added, the system automatically discovers the
new data and updates the other servers.

14. System Reliability

With other solutions, you must manually configure the data that needs to be protected. But with Neverfail, when
new data is introduced, or even when an entire new database is added, the system automatically discovers the
new data and updates the other servers.

15. Scalability – Cascading

Neverfail supports more than two servers. You can add more servers in the future to achieve additional
redundancy and disaster recovery in a scale-out manner.

16. Hardware Support

Neverfail is hardware agnostic – that is, it supports any server make and model, even between pairs of servers.

17. Support virtually any application

On natively supported tested applications, no configuration is needed during setup. For other applications,
support is simple.

Providence Solutions

Singapore Tel: (65) 6482-6302 Malaysia Tel (603) 7725-4850 Hong Kong Tel: (852) 8199-0039