Kanatek High Availability & Fail-over solutions integrate proven hardware from its technology partners and utilize networked storage architectures to leverage clustering. Downtime on any mission critical server - NFS, database, news, Web, ERP applications or other network component, can immediately disrupt operations, harm productivity, and impact the bottom line. As a result, enterprise IT operations responsible for applications that drive business processes are facing increasing pressure to ensure that those applications are available at all times. Kanatek responds to this challenge by architecting, integrating, and supporting highly available solutions that build redundancy into every aspect — from the lowest level components through network connectivity, to disks and servers.

A typical Kanatek High Availability solution includes:

• Symantec Cluster Server and application agent software
• Fibre Channel Fabric Switches from Brocade
• Fabric-aware Disk Storage Units from Hitachi

Kanatek's first step in developing High Availability and Failover solutions is the identification of potential single points of failure everywhere within the infrastructure supporting a mission-critical application(s). The next critical step — and one at which Kanatek excels — is architecting and configuring a solution that establishes failover parameters and ensures transparent availability of applications in the event of a failure anywhere within the infrastructure. Kanatek's High Availability and Failover solutions integrate proven and advanced hardware and software from our leading vendor partners, including Sun, Hitachi, HP, Quantum, Symantec, agámi and Brocade. Its strategic partnerships and close working relationships with these vendors means it is intimately aware of, certified on, and able to recommend and supply the products best suited to support its High Availability and Failover and clustering solutions.

Kanatek has implemented complex solutions ensuring the availability of everything from networked trading floor applications for international financial institutions, to mission-critical ERP applications for major global manufacturers.

• Users expect organizations to be open all hours and have "dial tone like" availability
• The overall perception of an organization's credibility is affected by its online performance
• Kanatek can create highly available systems from existing heterogeneous equipment working with products like Symantec Cluster Server™ software, Windows 2000 Server, Hitachi Freedom Storage Thunder 9200™ and Intel Xeon based servers.

Kanatek runs its own online Direct Sales portal and ensures it is Highly Available using Symantec software and Kanatek proprietary know-how. The key technical concepts adopted by Kanatek are:

• "Virtual IP address" float to the active server
• Heartbeat networks for private cluster communication
• Shared external disk storage (dual ported or SAN-attached)
  

Kanatek has the experience to help organizations cut down on the proliferation of servers that seems endemic in some organizations. Sometimes the rush to launch new products or applications means the IT infrastructure needed to run it becomes an afterthought and an IT group is left having to manage hundreds of servers, spread throughout an organization. Kanatek can help organizations review their infrastructure and cut down their costs, with no degradation in service quality. Kanatek can demonstrate application isolation and service level assurance using Sun's Solaris Resource Manager (SRM). SRM also provides resource management allocation on the shared server and is included in Solaris 9 or add-on to Solaris 8, 7 or 2.6.