Nag List,
Looking for your opinion on how to increase one of our applications uptime. Fist a little background:
Our vendor recently came out with a new version of a previously rock-solid application/service. Prior versions were internal to our phone system, actually sitting on a programmable circuit-pack within the switch. Pretty much it boiled down to that as long as the PBX was up, this application stayed up as well. While this particular application is not deemed 'CRITICAL' by our group (that designation is really only for life-saving/emergency services), it is pretty much deemed near-critical.
With this most recent release, the vendor has decided to externalize the application, having it sit on a Windows 2000/2003 server. That offers us many advantages, such as being able to throw more powerful equipment at it, and allowing it to integrate with our existing backup solution. However, as this application got externalized, it no longer has the resiliency / uptime that it once had. It is no longer the case that this application would work just as long as the PBX was up.
My question to the NAG list is this: How does one create a server environment (in Windows) that allows for automatic failover should this equipment or software fail? I am really looking for a solution that would allow the application on Server-A to run, and should it fail, Server-B would pick up without manual intervention. We would also need something that would be able to share a common IP address (as we don't want to re-home all the clients manually if/when the failure occurs).
The application is a standard Windows Services written in C++. It uses Sybase as it's DB in the background. It uses TCP/IP sockets to communicate to the end-clients. My standard solution of using an HTTP Load balancer or Java Application clustering won't seem to work in this case.
I am more personally in-tune with the Linux/Unix world as far as this goes, and haven't really been keeping up on it in the Windows side of the house. The vendor has suggested looking at EMC AutoStart, however in talking with EMC, they won't officially support Sybase DB's, and their solution may cause corruption to the DB.
Thanks for the help!
-Nick Kwiatkowski
MSU Telecom Systems, P&E Group
