Summary
This article provides the background story behind Neverfail including its origins, accomplishments, and core competence. After reading this article you will be familiar with Neverfail as an organization, its history, its structure, where they are located and its leadership.
The Beginning
In the late 90's, a group of consultants started Neverfail in Stirling, UK. They provided consulting services specializing in basic clustering, disaster recovery and business continuity. At the time, Microsoft Failover Cluster was one of the few clustering technology available for Windows platform. Neverfail also provided recommendations, wrote DR plans, implemented backup and restoration software.
Through this experience, they realized there were significant gaps in what these technologies of the time could do to protect mission critical applications, so they formed a software company. The goal was simple; provide a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery solution that addressed ALL the critical failure events that could happen and elevate this level of protection to allow for business continuance. The first version of Continuity Engine (then called "Heartbeat") premiered in 2001. The product started with support for Exchange Server and over the next four years, the business quickly grew with support for SQL Server, SharePoint, and Blackberry.
Please view the video "Disaster Recovery and DR Planning" hosted by Enterprise Strategy Groups Senior Analyst Mark Bowker. See why using Neverfail Continuity Engine enhances a VMWare Virtual Infrastructure to provide TRUE application aware failover for business continuance.
Around 2004, Neverfail introduced the "Application Management Framework" (AMF) which opened Continuity Engine up to all applications that run on Windows. Why? It allowed a way for services to be protected, files, folders, and registry to be replicated in real-time. It also introduced a plugin architecture that allow 3rd party applications to be easily integrated without having separate builds of Continuity Engine for each application. This plugin architecture also expanded the capabilities of the product to be able to monitor the operating system and applications using performance and application accessibility measurement. These now allowed Continuity Engine to launch recovery orchestration for very fast restoration of any application that runs on Windows in thirty to ninety seconds. This pivotal feature substantially accelerated the deployment of Continuity Engine for applications with a common set of rules that were consistent. Today, we have a library of over 50 applications that can be natively protected with Continuity Engine but using the AMF any application that runs on Windows can be protected.
The OEM Business
Due to the "Application Management Framework", Continuity Engine could now be easily tailored to 3rd party application vendors (ISV) for critical applications. The first of which was VMWare. VMWare's own management server vCenter provides critical services to that keeps a VMWare cluster managed. This includes VMwares own continuity technologies vMotion, Fault Tolerance, vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (SRM). In the version 4, 5 and 6 days, vCenter Server ran on Windows. VMWare realized it could provide hardware availability to other virtual machines running on its platform, but clearly it needed application aware failover to protect vCenter since it was mission critical. The vCenter Server Heartbeat was the OEM product based on Neverfail Continuity Engine that provided continuous availability for vCenter at the time. Today, it's still deployed in thousands of sites world-wide and continues to protect legacy VMWare infrastructure.
Neverfail's OEM business didn't stop there, others required the same level of protection such as Mitel, Cisco, Honeywell, AVST (now OpenText), Geist, Progress Software (MOVEit), and many others. OEMs have chosen Neverfail Continuity Engine to protect their applications and the list continues to grow every year.
Today's Neverfail
Today, Neverfail is a world-wide organization headquartered in Austin, TX, USA with offices in the UK and in Romania. The team has a long tenure with the company with the executive team alone having over a century focusing on business continuity and disaster recovery (which is our passion). Those who support the management team have been with the company an average of seven to ten years. With little turnover, this has allowed Neverfail to provide exceptional support and professional services globally.
When a ticket is opened with Neverfail support, customers are not shifted between different levels of support. Each customer comes in at level 3 and has a person with the knowledge of both support and implementation of the product. This team has literally seen every conceivable environment, in every type of datacenter, on every storage platform and has implemented Continuity Engine successfully.
Our currently leadership team consists of the following:
Neverfail has tens of thousands of deployments global across every market segment and vertical. Neverfail continues to have a compelling value proposition for the most critical applications with its award-winning application aware failover technology that is able to detect and react to hundreds of possible failure events on Windows.
Neverfail continues to innovate and has a long roadmap of upcoming features. Therefore, partners can expect innovation to continue to many years to come.