NEC Offers End-to-End Business Continuity Suite to Meet Availability Needs
NEC’s Fault Tolerant servers and ExpressCluster solutions deliver non-stop hardware failure protection with disaster recovery, in-flight maintenance, low TCO
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NEC Corporation of America today released an end-to-end business continuity suite for software disaster recovery and hardware continuous availability protection. The solution delivers virtually continuous uptime through its non-stop hardware, the NEC Fault Tolerant (FT) Express5800/300 series, combined with its data mirroring synchronization cluster software, NEC ExpressCluster. FT servers, combined with ExpressCluster over a wide area network (WAN), protect against business disruption from system outages caused by virtually any kind of unplanned or planned event while delivering application uptime at a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
NEC’s sixth-generation FT Express5800/300 servers are an affordable solution to deliver redundant lockstep processing using the latest Intel Xeon CPU technology. With fully redundant, hot-swappable server modules running in lockstep, NEC’s FT servers can keep running the applications, even if hardware in the primary server module fails for any reason. This allows organizations of any size to realize significantly higher levels of availability and system integrity as compared to standard servers, with the added benefit of operational simplicity.
Key features include:
- Continuous operation with up to 99.999 percent ("five nines") continuous availability, which is an average of about five minutes of potential downtime per year on average.
- Maximum Intel Xeon processor performance with lockstep management and fault detection handled separately by the NEC GeminiEngine chipset. All cores of the processor become available to deliver significantly faster performance than alternative fault tolerant software solutions.
- Operational simplicity with redundancy implemented at the hardware level which means only one operating system, one software application, one IP address, and one MAC address even though the applications run on two complete server modules.
- Lower TCO than software clusters or alternative fault tolerant software solutions -- the FT is a turnkey solution requiring one operating system and one application software license and doesn’t require clustering services or administrative resources for upgrades and annual maintenance fees.
- Non-stop software maintenance through NEC’s Active Upgrade, eliminating the need to disrupt server operations to conduct essential software maintenance.
- No-cost warranty repairs through NEC’s warranty program, which replaces the entire server module with a simple hot-swap server module replacement and doesn’t require costly restoration services and other expenses commonly experienced with software cluster re-sets or annual testing.
Software Clustering for Disaster Recovery Completes NEC’s Business Continuity Suite
NEC’s software cluster solution, ExpressCluster, provides high-availability application clustering, including the option of clustering over a WAN, to complete NEC’s suite of business continuity products. ExpressCluster offers fast recovery and protection of critical applications and data over a WAN with recovery in minutes through its synchronized data mirroring capabilities. Key features include:
- Comprehensive protection for many popular packaged applications and associated data
- Automatic failure detection and recovery within minutes instead of hours
- Flexible data mirroring for real-time critical transaction, data, and application protection
- Simplified updates and maintenance with easy-to-perform hardware or software updates while the system is running
NEC’s complete business continuity solution is available now. For more information about NEC’s Express5800 FT servers and ExpressCluster solutions, visit www.necam.com/servers.