C•CURE WITH EVERRUN
CONTINUOUS and HIGH AVAILABILITY VIRTUALIZATION SOFTWARE
Access Control Systems
Software House offers several methods for ensuring maximum uptime for a C•CURE® system. When evaluating a solution, the end user must balance the cost and complexity of the system with their “return to operation” (RTO) and availability requirements.
Reliability
and Availability for Critical Security Infrastructure
Traditionally, businesses have been challenged with the cost and complexity of an availability solution to keep their security infrastructure up and running. To achieve availability easily and affordably, Software House has selected an availability solution that provides the highest levels of availability at a cost similar to that of backup and failover solutions.
Availability Differences
1. Continuous Availability, also known as fault tolerance (FT), is the highest level of availability. This availability solution, where no single point of failure can interrupt the system, will keep operating as if nothing happened when a failure occurs. Unlike backup and failover solutions, with a continuous availability solution, there is no restart or reboot required and therefore, no downtime. This is important for C•CURE customers who cannot tolerate C•CURE being down for any amount of time. For example, when a security incident occurs, operators may need to immediately make changes
Key Benefits
• Ensures business continuity and data integrity by keeping C•Cure sytems up and running—easily and affordably
• Provides cost-effective availability efficiently with two off-the-shelf x86 servers and your choice of storage in one easy to use product. Other methods of achieving availability require additional servers, expensive storage options and a separate virtualization product
• Installs easily without modifications to applications or the need for specialized IT skills making it ideal for remote locations
• Validated to operate on C•Cure 9000 and C•Cure 800/8000
to the system like changing access to doors or privileges for classes of badges, or calling into other systems like the BMS or VMS.
2. High Availability (HA) is an availability solution that requires a system or application restart when a failure occurs. This level of availability is adequate for users who can tolerate a short disruption. For the C•CURE customer who is mainly concerned with managing badges, door access and event logs for door access—high availability is the appropriate level of availability. This customer is less concerned about a security incident, such as a forced door, that needs immediate responsive action.
3. Disaster Recovery (DR) provides long distance site protection between two separate sites over a WAN. This is a requirement for many organizations to meet compliance and business continuity goals.
Stratus Technologies everRun ® Availability Virtualization Software for C•CURE systems
Stratus’ everRun software provides continuous and high availability for C•CURE systems in both onsite and offsite locations easily and affordably. As security concerns abound and the cost of downtime rises, organizations are looking to minimize downtime and its impacts. When security monitoring and control operations stop, employee safety, company assets and data are compromised. With C•CURE running on Stratus everRun, your systems will continue to run with no downtime or data loss. All Stratus solutions have been validated to operate on C•CURE 9000 and C•CURE 800/8000.
everRun is licensed at two levels, everRun Enterprise® and everRun Express®, to fit different size and priced systems:
1. everRun® Enterprise – provides both continuous availability and high availability to multiple or single PVMs (referred to as a Protected Virtual Machine(s) – PVM) for Windows® or Linux® systems
2. everRun® Express – provides high availability to multiple or single HA Windows® or Linux® systems
everRun Enterprise is downtime prevention software that provides both continuous availability and high availability. If you have some systems that simply cannot fail, and some that can tolerate a brief interruption in service, than everRun Enterprise is the solution for you.
everRun Express provides high availability without complexity and recovers faster than other high availability solutions. If you have systems that only need high availability, than everRun Express is the solution for you.
How Does everRun Work?
Two servers are linked via a virtualization platform that pairs protected virtual machines together to create a single operating environment. We call this technology everRun Availability Services. In everRun Enterprise, if one physical machine should fail, the application will continue to run on the other physical machine without any interruptions or data loss. This “statepointing” ensures all in-flight transactions as well as data in memory and cache is preserved—without machine restarts or data loss.
In everRun Express, one machine is active, the other is on standby. If one machine fails, the application restarts on the standby machine with minimal interruptions or data loss. The I/O is automatically mirrored to the redundant server.
For both everRun Enterprise and everRun Express, if a hardware component fails, everRun substitutes the healthy component from the second system until the failed component is repaired or replaced.
SplitSite ®
SplitSite, an integrated everRun add-on, provides metro-wide offsite application availability across geographically separated sites using synchronous replication. This feature is available in both everRun Enterprise and everRun Express at a fixed price.
Split-site configurations are limited to 10ms round trip A-Link latency for high availability VMs and 2ms round trip A-Link latency for continuous availability VMs. Separation of up to 10km (using 1000BASE-LX) is a common A-Link network topology that can meet the latency requirements for most deployments. Use of quorum is required for SplitSite configurations to protect against data loss (due to split brain) and to safely enable VMs to start up automatically if a second everRun physical machine (node) or site has failed. Quorum availability is improved if quorum is placed at a third location and an appropriate quorum networking design is implemented.
Specific training or professional services assistance is necessary to deploy SplitSite correctly and a SplitSite license is required to receive technical support on a SplitSite configuration.
ARCServe
ARCServe, a 3rd party disaster recovery add-on that uses asynchronous replication over a WAN, can be used as either a complementary product to everRun or between two single machines at two sites without everRun at either site. This product is licensed for three different configurations:
ARCServe Licenses:
1. Virtual Machine to Virtual Machine (V2V): An everRun system located at each site with ARCServe providing DR between these sites. This is the lowest cost license, because the customer uses everRun on both sites.
2. Virtual Machine to Primary Machine (V2P): everRun running on the primary site and a single machine at the DR site
3. Primary Machine to Primary Machine (P2P): A single machine at the primary and DR site. This is the highest cost license, because the customer does not have any everRun in the solution.
The second configuration and license is the most common—it combines the power of continuous availability for local protection with industry leading continuous data replication technology to address off-site disaster recovery requirements. everRun with ARCServe helps both large and small IT organizations address the full range of threats to application availability with a single unified solution, simplifying a complex and multi-tiered problem.
Together, C•CURE with everRun, will keep your customer environments always-secure and always-on.
Abou t Stratus
Stratus Technologies is the leading provider of infrastructurebased solutions that keep applications running continuously in today’s always-on world. Stratus enables rapid deployment of always-on infrastructures—from enterprise servers to clouds—without any changes to applications. Stratus’ flexible solutions—software, platform and services—prevent downtime before it occurs and ensure uninterrupted performance of essential business operations.
To learn more, visit stratus.com
To learn more, about Software House, visit swhouse.com
SplitSite