DCIG, LLC Announces Insider's Guide to High Availability and Clustering Software
Austin, Texas (PRWEB) July 23, 2013 -- When the average cost per hour of system downtime can reach the hundreds of thousands of dollars in many situations (1), it should come as no surprise then that companies that rely on IT to maintain high availability of critical applications, OS and servers demand real-time system uptime. Coupled with the way high availability has changed with the rapid deployment of cost-saving virtualization solutions, eliminating unpredictable and unforeseen consequences across an entire organization is not a need to have, but must have.
This is why more and more companies rely on high availability and clustering software solutions to help create highly redundant operating platforms so that applications can easily be ported across both physical and virtual infrastructures. As DCIG storage consultant, and co-author of the newly released High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide, has noted, thanks to the current slate of high availability and clustering software solutions available today, IT may no longer need to push the button and "pray to the heavens" that everything works as expected when testing failover for a disaster recovery and business continuity planning process.
“With more clustering solutions that support both physical and virtual platforms concurrently, organizations can reap significant cost-savings and consolidation features while also maintaining the flexibility to failover application stacks to physical machines if necessary,” said Jerome Wendt, president and lead analyst, DCIG, LLC. “This is a win-win-win for the end users, the IT departments that serve them and ultimately for the businesses that need them to be to be always on. However, with so many solutions on the market, it’s not always easy to find the right resource that will help select a short-list of products to address your specific needs. It’s that fundamental belief in having the right resource available that DCIG is proud to announce the availability of its latest guide for high availability and clustering software solutions.”
For the latest High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide, DCIG, LLC evaluated 13 offerings from 11 companies. After an initial questionnaire of more than 50 questions was completed, participating companies’ capabilities were assessed from the questionnaire and from information available in the public domain. Solutions were then evaluated for more than 50 characteristics, and weighted after conversations with end-users. After scores were compiled, solutions were assessed and ranked either “Best-in-Class,” “Recommended,” “Excellent,” “Good,” and “Basic” across functionality and capability relative to the overall market landscape. The intent for this Buyer’s Guide, as with all DCIG Buyer’s Guides, is to provide an “at-a-glance” comparison from which end users can select the most appropriate solution for their existing needs. The Buyer’s Guide also provides perspective on how solutions from less well known storage providers compare against established and better known brands.
The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide Top solutions include (in alphabetical order): Citrix XenServer 5.5 High Availability; HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux; IBM Power HA System Mirror for AIX; Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Cluster Server; Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1; RedHat Enterprise Linux High Availability; Symantec Cluster Server (VCS); Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability for Windows; and, VMware High Availability 5.x.
Symantec Cluster Server earned the only “Best-in-Class” ranking, and for good reason. It ranked “Best-in-Class” and/or “Excellent” in every category that DCIG evaluated. Wendt noted, “Making Symantec’s achievement so impressive was that it’s in a highly competitive space where most high availability and clustering software packages only focus on a few or even only one operating system. Symantec stands apart with its support for all standard operating systems and takes this support one step further by allowing failovers to be orchestrated across multiple operating systems.”
The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide helps end users determine solutions that may best fit their needs by:
• Providing an objective, third party evaluation of high availability/clustering software that evaluates and scores their features from an end user’s perspective
• Scoring and ranking the features of each high availability/clustering software solution based upon the criteria that matter most to end users and then presents these results in an easy to understand table that displays the products’ scores and rankings so they can quickly ascertain which high availability/clustering software solutions are the most appropriate for their needs
• Providing a standardized data sheet for each of the 13 high availability/clustering software solutions from 11 different high availability/clustering software providers so users may do quick comparisons of the features that are supported and not supported on each product
• Giving any organization a solid foundation for getting competitive bids from different high availability/clustering software providers that are based on “apples-to-apples” comparisons.
“High availability and clustering software have been part of the computing industry since the 1960’s when it was originally developed by end users who could not do all of their work on a single computer system,” added Wendt. “What is relatively new are the robust features found in these software packages that enable highly virtualized organizations to take availability and clustering to the next level.”
Disclosure and Methodology
DCIG identified more than 10 plus companies that provide high availability and clustering software. Each provider was given the opportunity to complete a survey with 50 questions and had to meet the following criteria:
• Supports more than two nodes in a cluster
• Enables the ability to cluster at minimum two standard applications (e.g. Oracle, Exchange)
• Supports a centralized management and reporting structure
• Supports medium to long distance high availability/clustering options
• Provides data protection/replication thru existing software features and/or third party add-on’s
• Software must be generally available by May 1, 2013
In every case every, the participating vendor had the opportunity to review and respond to the survey and the information regarding their product displayed on the data sheets included in this Buyer’s Guide.
There were some cases where high availability and clustering software providers elected not to respond to DCIG’s inquiries or requests. While those products were still covered in this Buyer’s Guide, the information as presented in this Guide may be incomplete or not represent all of the product’s capabilities. In cases where no responses were received, a notation is included on the bottom of that product’s data sheet indicating that all information displayed is strictly drawn from publicly available sources.
DCIG also spoke to various end-users to get a sense of how they would weight their needs in these various areas. DCIG then evaluated the vendors’ capabilities by applying weighting indicated from our conversations with these end-users. No vendors, whether clients or not, were afforded preferential treatment in the Buyer’s Guide. All research was based upon information provided directly by vendors, research and analysis by DCIG and other publicly available information.
It is worth noting that each Buyer’s Guide is not intended to be a substitute for internal testing. DCIG encourages any organization that is considering the purchase of any solution included in a Buyer’s Guide to do its own in-house testing.
Availability
The DCIG High Availability and Clustering Software is available immediately and may be downloaded for no charge with registration at the following http://dcigbuyersguides.com/2013-high-availability-clustering-software-buyers-guide/.
Resources:
DCIG Blog: http://www.dcig.com
About DCIG
DCIG, LLC, is an analyst firm with headquarters in Texas, focusing on archive, backup, retrieval and storage systems. DCIG’s analysts blend analysis, journalism, advertising and marketing into compelling blog entries at http://www.dciginc.com as well as journalistic writings with leading trade and industry publications. DCIG’s goal is to provide evaluations and interview content on sponsoring and non-sponsoring companies to consumers, public relations firms, business analysts and other companies. DCIG distributes industry, company and product analysis by way of viral marketing and community building using the burgeoning BLOG infrastructures created worldwide.
(1) Csaplar, D. (2012, February). Datacenter Downtime: How Much Does It Really Cost? Retrieved from: http://www.aberdeen.com
Jim Nash, DCIG, http://www.dciginc.com, 952-442-8608, [email protected]
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