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Web Design And Hosting Service Company Benefits From XLink's ClusterReplica Software For Server High Availability and Continuous Data Protection
Vanguard Computer Systems, Inc. offers Server co-location, web hosting/design, offsite backups and image archival applications sampling of its services to the Medical, Legal, Restaurant and Corporate industries. With 45 servers, Redundant OC3 Fiber Backbones, 6 SQL servers, a 1 gig network infrastructure all contained in their modern climate controlled facility, and newly updated hosting environment from vb6 to .net and asp to aspx, Vanguard stands behind its claimed mission: 100% customer satisfaction through minimal server down-time and fast, professional technical support. Its clients have grown to thousands spreading up-and-down the east coast and across the US. In pursuit of its mission, Vanguard is backed by a team of technical specialists highly trained in the Microsoft Windows environment on which Vanguard and their clients rely.
The New Challenges
At the wake of hurricanes and other natural disasters, Vanguard has taken steps to provide disaster data recovery for its clients. "Most if not all of our corporate client base will be migrated to clustering for either SQL or IIS Web server for 100% up time - we are looking forward to have them DNS failover to our secure data centers so they do not have to keep the backup server on site -providing another layer of protection", noted by Anthony Pennacchio, President Of Vanguard.
Reaching the goal of continuous data protection and server 24x7 availability requires Vanguard identifying its special needs. In summary:
1. Having hundreds of web sites on each of the servers, it needs an application that can handle IIS web server 24x7 availability.
2. Because most of its clients are physically far away from the service center, the clustering must be able to handle cross-network failover.
3. Data replication must be able to work in real-time to minimize data loss.
4. Data replication must be able to handle files of all types including MS SQL database files which many of its clients use for their business operation.
Vanguard has lived up its promise to its clients in providing proactive solutions to their business challenges. Its new challenge is providing Disaster Recovery and Failover protection. Moving to the next level of customer satisfaction, it is an innovative advancement.
Evaluation
In their search for the most effective data protection and server availability software application, some major features must be included:
1. ability to handle real-time data replication including database files
2. ability to perform automatic server Failover
3. ability to handle remote clustering for both LAN and WAN
Besides these technical requirements, a reliable cost-effective product and proficient technical support are equally important to Vanguard Computers. Vanguard required a vendor to be proficient with technical responses and offer real world "working" solutions the inevitable issues that will arise.
There are many software applications in the market that provide solutions Vanguard is looking for. After researching and comparing, they settled on the ClusterReplica software by XLink Technology. ClusterReplica software is specially designed for small companies to run on Windows systems. It binds up to 8 Windows systems for data protection and server high availability purposes. Besides real-time data replication and automatic failover capabilities, the ClusterReplica software offers scheduled backup through ftp method to instantly transfer data to their off site servers for a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Anthony Pannacchio, the IT consultant of Vanguard, said that it is an "effective solution that actually works out of the box!". For Vanguard Computers, the attraction also lies in XLink's "timely, accurate and helpful" technical support.
The XLink Solution
The cost-effectiveness is the key factor that brings XLink's ClusterReplica software out of the crowds. While supporting all major features that all other similar products claim to support,
XLink's ClusterReplica software costs only a fraction of the price of these other products.
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