Overview

Solutions > High Availability

HVR Keeps Mission-Critical Systems Online 24/7

High Availability is the generic term for systems and procedures ensuring that mission-critical systems remain online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This includes solutions to handle unplanned downtime and avoid planned downtime. High Availability ("HA") is closely related to Business Continuity ("BC").
Unplanned downtime includes unforeseen circumstances such as power outages, failed CPU or RAM components, or a fire in a data center. HVR’s protection solution against unplanned downtime typically consists of two elements;

Disaster Recovery Server. This is a separate system that is preferably located at another building and if possible in a different town.

Business Continuity Server. This is a local replica of the production system. If for reason the main system is interrupted, a switchover is made to this up-to-date server to ensure business continuity. This solution also ensures that business can continue in the event of planned downtime (e.g. maintenance tasks) for one of the servers.

Unplanned Downtime Offsite Disaster Recovery. HVR is extremely efficient and safe over a network (WAN). This makes it affordable to install a disaster recovery database offsite, in another building, or in a different town. This could protect from power outage or network outage in the area. It may safeguard business continuity in the event of major disasters such as hurricane or earthquake. Sometimes planned downtime can also carry the risk of unplanned downtime, for example after a major upgrade an important system may suddenly fail. Load Balancing Active / Active The systems that are connected together using HVR to ensure High Availability (e.g. production system and back-up system) do not have to be passive machines, which are only used after emergency. They can also both be used as active systems to diminish the load from the production machine and spread it evenly among the systems. The transactions spread to the other system can vary. They can be read-only transactions, or for a reporting database they can be read-write transactions for an active-active configuration.

Planned Downtime Planned downtime is when the system has to be set offline for a scheduled operation that cannot take place when end-users are connected. In the past, planned downtime was scheduled at night or outside office hours. However, many enterprises now operate 24/7 due to the internet and globalization. HVR Software has solutions that can keep information available even when planned downtime is required. Planned downtime can be necessary for; Maintenance. HVR permits zero-downtime maintenance. No need to perform maintenance work at night or on the weekend.   Upgrades. HVR permits zero-downtime upgrades of applications, DBMS version and Operating System.   Migrations. A migration means that a system is rearchitectured, which can take a long time to complete. HVR can complete migrations with zero-downtime and with reduced risk.