Bespoke Application Recovery

Recovery of any application

There are many applications within the corporate infrastructure. Some may be standard and found within virtually any organisation such as email, and some are unique to the organisation or industry.

LifeKeeper provides pre-written recovery for standard applications such as Exchange and Apache for example, but also provides the mechanism to recover any other application too. Non-standard applications can be monitored, protected and recovered by our fully integrated Generic Recovery Kit with minimal set up and programming. There are no special APIs and no requirement for software development. The Generic Kit just needs to know how to start and stop the application - this will be the rc scripts on Linux or the start /stop service names on Windows.

Combining standard and non-standard application recovery

At Open Minds, we have helped our customers to recover many non-standard applications. Some examples are payroll applications, lesser-known databases, industry specific applications and even DOS applications. These have all been able to recover on a second server.

Often these projects have the following common factors:

• The customer has applications that were not written with high availability or disaster recovery in mind.
• Some form of disaster recovery has now become necessary either through regulatory requirements or customer demand.
• The customer is surprised how easily we can solve the problem.

With our expertise and knowledge we can make the solution low cost and provide an elegant solution to this problem.

This approach allows both standard and non-standard applications to be monitored and recovered alongside each other. There are no changes required within the application itself as LifeKeeper sits on top of the application. In addition, bespoke applications are monitored alongside standard ones making it easier for administrators to see the health of all applications in a single GUI interface.

A possible scenario

An organisation may use a standard database such as SQL Server for its website and also have a home-grown industry specific application for delivery of orders. Both are equally important to the functioning of the company and have been highlighted for automated recovery.

LifeKeeper provides a standard SQL Server ‘Recovery Kit’ for recovering the SQL database on a second server. Open Minds will provide the recovery of the non-standard application by using a combination of the customers expertise and Open Minds skills to provide a bespoke recovery kit. This will then be supported by Open Minds.
As a further benefit, both the servers can be used to recover each other. This scenario is given below:

The Open Minds Generic recovery kit means that you dont have to spend time creating your own scripts to monitor and recover applications.

For a seamless recovery of your Apache servers, SteelEye Life Keeper from Open Minds guarantees to provide you with a complete disaster recovery solution ensuring that you maintain business continuity. Our high availability solutions will grant continuous data protection providing data replication as well as the monitoring of all your Apache servers to ensure failover through the Java GUI.