Virtually every company we talk to needs both disaster recovery solutions to recover their systems and data after a major disruption, and high availability to keep key applications always available. In my discussions with companies considering our everRun software, I’ve heard a lot of them say that they are confused by many vendors’ claims and counter-claims for DR and HA. One of the biggest sources of confusion is that some vendors with solid products for disaster recovery are trying to pass off their DR solutions as reliable HA solutions. If the feedback I’m getting is any indication, these DR solutions posing as HA solutions just don’t work.

It’s not hard to see why a DR solution doesn’t make a good HA solution. With a product that is good at DR, in most cases getting the data across to the other location is pretty straightforward. But when you try to use the same solution to get both the application and the data across to use it for HA, well that’s where it breaks down. Let’s look at why.

A good DR product is usually fairly easy to set up for data replication to another site. But setting up the same product to restart the whole thing, application and data, when a failover occurs is complex and prone to errors. To set it up, you have to script all the pieces to make it happen – fault detection, client redirection to the DR site, application reset, and the list goes on. No wonder we so often hear that scripted-DR-for-HA doesn’t work consistently – there are too many moving parts that have to managed and monitored. In addition, no matter how minor a failure is, failover to the remote site is required. Not every failure you face is a disaster; therefore each failure should not be treated as one. Based on these horror stories, we thought it was a good idea to put together this webinar, Breaking Through the Confusion about DR and HA. I hope to help you better understand when, how, and why DR is the best fit to meet your requirements, when to use an HA solution and how to combine the two for optimal protection.

Interested? You can register here.