MessageOne Cuts App Downtime With One-Touch Failover

When an application goes down, the race is on. Will the IT administrator get a message out quickly about the pending problem? Or will users pummel him with calls before he can do a thing? MessageOne Inc. is reworking the odds in favor of the IT team.

The failover and replication vendor is unveiling one-touch failover, alerts, and data replication. The OneSwitch dashboard console gives administrators a central view of multiple Windows applications such as Exchange and controls initiate failover between remote sources. MessageOne estimates the process takes about 15 minutes before downed apps are available to users.

OneSwitch also includes remote monitoring and notification of potential problems so administrators can head off outages before they get critical. Snapshot capabilities and real-time replication from third parties also are provided. Most important, OneSwitch takes away manual steps for primary shutdown, secondary shutdown, and prepping the secondary site to take over. The OneSwitch software and service costs $300 per pair of servers a month.

The tool makes sense for any large company in which an hour of downtime would be a disaster, one analyst says. "It allows companies to keep apps available all the time," says Michael Osterman, analyst and founder at IT market-research firm Osterman Research. "And administrators could always see problems before the users notice them."