Artisan Infrastructure Enhances IT Continuity Engine

Artisan Infrastructure, LLC, in cloud management and BC solutions, announced enhancements to its IT Continuity Engine (ITCE), including support for VMware vCenter Server.

The latest updates deliver BC for VMware vCenter Server, protecting VM-based applications from downtime. ITCE’s integration with VMware provides a HA, DR solution which supplements or replaces native VMware BC and DR (BCDR) solutions.

Artisan Infrastructure’s ITCE core technology was the foundational technology originally used to protect vCenter. VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat was the solution of choice for administrators to protect against infrastructure and application failure or performance degradation. While enhanced, the solution remains capable of protecting critical business systems against application, server, network, storage or site failures and is deployed across organizations to protect critical business applications. These organizations rely upon the solution to affordably ensure BC in their virtual infrastructure. ITCE software is an application-aware IT continuity solution for vCenter Server designed to mitigate downtime before it can impact business applications.

ITCE advantages for VMware vCenter Server environments include the prevention of data loss by ensuring a near-zero RPO. Downtime is addressed with near-zero RTO by detecting and remediating failure signatures in protected applications before they cause downtime. Additionally, ITCE allows for the orchestration of site failovers for critical applications and business services in the event of a site outage. The solution also provides for failback to the primary infrastructure once the original issue has been remediated.

New features in IT Continuity Engine include:

• Application-aware remediation: ITCE real-time application monitoring has been integrated with vSphere HA Clusters delivering application-aware virtual clusters that can remediate application performance issues before the applications fail and cause downtime.
• CDP: ITCE updates data continuously, so that remote servers always have the same data as the primary server.
• Uninterrupted DR testing: ITCE provides application-aware HA and DR for two (pair) or three (trio) servers. Failover in a trio configuration is often set up to provide automatic local failover and push-button remote failover. When performing a planned switch-over in this configuration, the operator is given the option of performing a switch-over to either the secondary or tertiary machine in the cluster. DR tests can be conducted quickly without interrupting production servers.
• Hardware agnostic: HA and DR solutions from Artisan Infrastructure’s Neverfail portfolio are hardware agnostic and versatile. They are not architecturally dependent upon a file share witness or a cluster quorum as these introduce single points of failure.
• Simplified workflows and installation: The enhanced, wizard-driven setup with simplified workflow speeds setup and enables proper installation.
• Accelerated, simplified recovery: ITCE provides a true clone-based architecture with no boot times, which speeds up RPO and RTO and simplifies recovery architecture.
  

“Threats to IT infrastructure are constantly evolving. It is imperative for organizations to spend more efforts on prevention versus the much more costly reaction to such threats,” said Marc Staimer, CDS, Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Based on the concept that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, preventative measures such as the ITCE, enables organizations to reduce the cost and consequences of inevitable application, server, network or storage downtime in virtualized infrastructure.“

“The latest enhancements to Neverfail ITCE are compelling and will be an asset for many operations where protection of the host server from failure is not enough,” said Steven Man, infrastructure architect, Ashurst LLP. “With support for VMware vCenter Server, Artisan Infrastructure is addressing VMware HA’s inability to detect problems due to operator error or application defects within VMs. By providing comprehensive protection against any problem which may threaten downtime, the solution ensures that organizations remain online and open for business.“

“Our extensive experience and collaboration with VMware has provided us many valuable insights, allowing the delivery of this advanced solution for business customers running vSphere and other products,” said Brian Hierholzer, CEO, Artisan Infrastructure. “ITCE fills significant gaps in vSphere data protection caused by architectural changes, mixed hypervisor deployments and complex environments that require deep skill sets. As part of our BC management solutions, we’re delivering vCenter protection to meet and exceed requirements today or that may surface in the future.“