10 reasons to choose a software high availability solution

Five economical reasons:
  1. Simple and economic
  2. The best use cases
  3. 3 products in 1
  4. Reduce costs
  5. Address all failures
 Five technical reasons:
  1. Rich choice of integration
  2. Plug and play deployment
  3. Simple administration
  4. Synchronous replication
  5. Proof of concept
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Simple and economical software high availability solution


Traditional hardware high availability solutions are implemented on high-end servers and are focused on the hardware failover of physical or virtual servers.

SafeKit is a software-only high availability solution available on Windows and Unix. The product is designed to provide transparently load balancing to applications, real-time replication of their data and application failover on software or hardware failures.


The best use cases of software clustering


After over 15 years of 24x7 experience, SafeKit is the preferred clustering solution on the market in three cases.


A software publishing company adds SafeKit to its application suite as a software high availability and load balancing OEM option.


A distributed enterprise deploys a high availability solution on standard hardware without the need for specific IT skills.


A data center saves hardware clustering costs with a simple and economical software clustering solution on Windows and Unix.


Unique on the market: 3 products in 1


Traditionally, three different products are necessary to create hardware clusters:

  1. load balancing network boxes,

  2. disk bays replicated synchronously on a SAN for data availability,

  3. high-availability toolkits for application failure recovery.

SafeKit offers these three products within the same software. Moreover, as SafeKit is a toolkit, each feature can be configured or not according your need.


Reduce costs associated to hardware clustering


SafeKit is hardware independent and runs on your existing physical or virtual servers. It works with the standard editions of OS and databases: standard editions of Windows, Unix, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or other database or file… and even with Windows 7.


Business continuity solution which addresses all types of failures


In addition to hardware failures, SafeKit addresses also the software failures and the human errors that are other causes of information system downtime and loss of business. The product solves the following problems.

  • Hardware and environment failure: including the complete failure of a computer room.

  • Software failure of a critical application: software bug, overloaded service, regression on software update.

  • Human error: too complex failover solution and inability to properly restart a critical service.


Rich choice of application integration inside a software cluster


Cluster configuration for a given application is rich and is made with one or several application modules. SafeKit proposes mirror modules (primary/secondary with replication and failover), farm modules (load balancing with failover), and mixed of several modules.

Writing an application module is simple and consists in defining:

  1. a xml configuration file with the file directories to replicate for a mirror module, with the load balancing rules for a farm module, with the configuration of software and hardware failure detectors,

  2. two start an stop scripts to restart the application in case of software or hardware failures.


Plug and play deployment of a software cluster


Once a failover module is configured and tested with an application, deployment requires no specific IT skills.

On two standard Windows or Unix servers, just install the application, the SafeKit software, the module and configure the module with the names of servers and cluster on the network.


User-friendly administration to avoid human error


Human errors are avoided by providing the administrator with a very simple interface to control critical applications under his or her charge (red, green, magenta status and start, stop, swap buttons). This is complemented by a user documentation that integrates the troubleshooting procedures.

Using the SafeKit generic command line interface, all applications integrated inside application modules can be controlled in a generic way into Patrol, Microsoft SCOM, Nagios consoles...

Note that a SafeKit application module can be installed on a single server. In this case, it will present to the administrator the very simple interface to stop or start the critical application on the server. And it will restart automatically the application on software failure.


Synchronous replication for transactional applications


SafeKit’s synchronous replication function strengthens high availability and prevents data loss. With this mechanism, a data committed on a disk by a transactional application is replicated on the secondary machine.

Synchronous replication can be implemented in geographically remote computer rooms through an extended LAN to withstand the loss of a full room.

During asynchronous replication (classically implemented by other solutions in the market), the risk of losing data if the primary server fails is high. It is therefore important to always prefer a synchronous replication solution such as SafeKit for high availability of a critical application.


Make your own proof of concept with the free trial


You can test SafeKit for free. As it is an independent hardware solution, you can easily implement your first software cluster on two existing virtual or physical machines.


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