Why You Should Sell Neverfail Continuity Engine?

Why You Should Sell Neverfail Continuity Engine?

Summary

This Knowledge base article discusses the benefits of selling Neverfail products and why Neverfail is a great addition to your product portfolio.

More Information

Since its inception over 20 years ago, Neverfail has provided world-class business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for Windows. However, continuity technologies have changed, Windows operating systems have matured, but one thing is the same....mission critical applications need to be restored very quickly or organizations can suffer disastrous losses.

In this knowledge base article, we will consider three areas that will make Continuity Engine a compelling story and why partners would want to sell it in their local markets.

The Technology

Technology changes over time and there has been some advancements in business continuity and disaster recovery tools. However, when a customer is considering a technology to protect their applications its important to educate them of the differences and what failure use cases they work best in. So it's really on you, as a partner, to help your customers make the right choices.

When looking at ALL the different technologies you can categorize them into four different types:
  1. Backup and Recovery: This includes day to day backups of data locally and offsite backup to archival storage.
  2. Data Protection (Advanced or Intelligent Backup and Recovery): This includes data replication and orchestrated recovery from backup.
  3. Hardware Resilience: This includes basic clustering, fault tolerance, and virtual availabiilty such as VMWare HA & FT.
  4. Business Continuance: Provides some of the previous three with application aware intelligence for near instant recovery.
All of these categories are important and have a place in an overall business continuity plan. However, classifying applications are critical to ensure the customer understands the value of each application and knows what continuity technology to apply to them. This is where our partners come in as a trusted advisor that can distinguish Neverfail against the competition in terms of value.

As you know, Continuity Engine is designed for "Continuous Availability". This puts it in the area of business continuance. What is business continuance? It is the ability to restore critical applications that are linked to the survivability (or continuation) of an organization. This is a type of technology that can nearly instantly restore these systems locally or remotely so organizations can continue to conduct business. These are usually revenue driven applications, core business operational applications, critical safety applications, or applications that ensure human health and well-being. Engine provides a vast intelligence layer that powers business continuance such to:
  1. Monitor for a multitude of different events throughout the application server covering  application issues, hardware failures, networking interruptions, and operating system failures.
  2. Use proactive intelligence to trigger automatic failover with little or zero human intervention.
  3. Restore business services in 30 - 90 seconds with bulletproof Windows failover orchestration and no distance limitations.
  4. Leverage a secure cloned based architecture that ensures your passive nodes are available, and ready for failure, even in the event of a catastrophic loss of the production server.
  5. Provides a single common and proven method of protection.
  6. Continuity Engine will failover any server application that runs on Windows.
What is TRUE application awareness? When you look at backup, data protection, and some clustering technologies, those solutions will spin application awareness almost as if it was a simple checkbox option. If you look deeper, it's usually the ability to backup data in an "application consistent" manor. While this is important, its not TRUE application awareness. Application awareness in terms of business continuance must take into consideration the state of application services, performance, and accessibility of the application. It looks for performance and failure events at the operating system level. It can see when there is interruption of networking that deliver critical business services. Backup, data protection and some clustering technologies simply can't accomplish this!

Without this type of differentiation, many customers can be led into a false sense of security by using a broad brush (using one technology for everything) on very complex business continuity issues. Those customers will then find out at the time failure it wasn't the right technology for a business continuance type of application.

Why Business Continuance is Necessary

In spring 2021, a massive cyber-attack crippled an energy distribution company here in the United States with ransomware. This is significant because they paid millions of dollars in ransom to recover their critical energy distribution systems. This organization obviously didn't prepare for business continuance. With a product like Continuity Engine, this customer would of had a tool to recover from ransomware in just a few minutes because of the way it secures and protects the passive nodes and provides data rollback capabilities on each node in the cluster. This ensures clean, uncorrupted data can be recovered at the time of failover. With this company, it took six days to start the recovery process (the average ransomware recovery is seven days). However, understanding what happened, who did it, and restoring infrastructure hygiene is where each organization should put most of their efforts. With Continuity Engine, recovery is the easy part.

In winter 2021, an unprecedented winter storm froze the entire state of Texas, USA. Winter temperatures very rarely hit freezing and when they do its usually overnight and it warms up the next day. In this case, when the storm came, it snowed in most of the state and sent the state into a deep freeze for days. This took the entire electrical grid offline in frigid conditions. Many organizations were completely taken off guard as nobody ever expected the entire state to come to a complete halt. Again, they didn't prepare for business continuance. With Continuity Engine, many of our customers plan for these types of outages. They can on demand move business IT operations to an alternate geographical location (preferably on another power grid) to ensure they can continue operations unabated and have them operational in a couple of minutes. 

Business Continuance in Real Terms

In 2017, hurricane Harvey hit the Houston, Texas, USA area. A Neverfail customer saw this coming and heeded the warnings of massive flooding and used Continuity Engine to proactively moved all their most critical applications in just a few seconds to without their users knowing. Just hours later their production datacenter was 20 feet (6 meters) underwater. They were able to run at the DR site for several months.  Months later when the production datacenter was rebuilt, they were able to use Continuity Engine to repopulate their systems from the DR servers back into the production environment and gracefully switch them back to the new production datacenter with zero data loss.

In 2013, a Neverfail customer experienced a flooding event from a broken water main in their datacenter. This effectively destroyed their production hosts and all their virtual machines as water showered down on them from the ceiling. They had HA (high availability) deployed with Continuity Engine to their datacenter in another building. The staff was obviously taken off guard by such a sudden and catastrophic event. However, Continuity Engine's application awareness detected the systems were slowly going offline and automatically initiated failover to the passive nodes in HA mode in the other building. So, while the incident was costly, the mission critical applications continued without human intervention. 

Achieving Robust Profitability Through Product and Service Offerings

Assuming partners complete all the sales, marketing and professional services training there are several ways to Go-to-Market with Continuity Engine. We encourage both license and professional services engagements as a primary means of monetization. However there are other things that can be done.
  1. Product and Services Bundles: Engine comes with multiple part numbers with additional features like WANSmart, Tertiary, training and health checks. The partner can purchase heath checks from Neverfail support directly, however, health checks are performed by Neverfail support in conjunction with the partner.  This service can be given to the partner for branding and delivery to the end user. Professional services can be bundled with Neverfail team doing the work or your staff. It reduces the back-and-forth negotiations on individual line items and moves the deal to closure faster.
  2. Frontline Support: If customers want local representation, partners could offer front-line support as an option. Frontline would be a partner acting om behalf of a customer. They would triage, grab logs, and open tickets to be the conduit for the customer to Neverfail. This is in addition to what already comes with Continuity Engine (which is Standard and Enterprise support).
  3. Fully Managed Services: If an end customer wants a local VAR or MSP to totally manage the Neverfail deployment, this too can be bundled into a turnkey solution.


In addition, there are means of attaching Continuity Engine to other products and services offerings a partner may have. The following shows how you can increase Continuity Engine sales quickly:
  1. Hardware Procurement - Double the Hardware Compacity Potential
    1. Package Continuity Engine with Hardware
    2. Accelerate HW Sales up to 3X
  2. Package with 3rd Party Software You're are Already Selling
  3. Package as Part of a Larger Project
  4. Offer BC/DR as Part of Your Windows Server and Windows 10 Offering
    1. Increases Windows Server and Windows 10/11 Licenses up to 3X
    2. Increased Uptime for Customer
  5. Package with Database Sales
    1. Microsoft SQL Server
    2. Oracle
    3. PostGreSQL
    4. MySQL
There is no real limit on how partners can put together a Neverfail Continuity Engine service and product offerings. We highly encourage partners to be creative in their offerings and spread the net wide with Neverfail. Therefore, profitably driven by a robust service offering can be a very compelling for both you and your customers.

In this article, we have talked about how Continuity Engine is very compelling from a technology, real world business continuance and a product and service offering.  Understanding this will ensure you become a trusted advisor of your customer, provide them with a solution that best fits their continuity needs while offering the products and services that support it. This is why you should sell Neverfail Continuity Engine!

Applies To

All Versions


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