Four Cost-Effective Mirroring Solutions Provide NetWare Redundancy

By Scott S. Campbell   Has the price tag of fully redundant hardware or the lack of clustering technologies kept you from delivering fault tolerance to your NetWare environment? If 24x7 availability is on your networking wish list, but it's just out of reach for you, then you might consider a many-to-one mirroring solution--a cost-effective technology for NetWare server redundancy. Unlike Novell's SFT-III, which is a one-to-one identical server solution that requires a dedicated high-speed interconnection, the packages we tested for this review let a single NetWare mirror server provide extended data availability, and even s tand in for other servers in heterogeneous NetWare environments. To view the Report card. We tested four NetWare server mirroring packages--Global Data Security USA LANshadow 4.6, Network Integrity LANtegrity 4.0 for NetWare, NSI Software Double-Take 2.6 for NetWare and Vinca Corp. StandbyServer Many-to-One 2.12 for NetWare/IntranetWare--in Network Computing's Syracuse University lab, running them through their paces in a mixed NetWare 3.12, 4.10 and 4.11 environment. Our mirroring server was an IntranetWare 4.11 server running on a Dell Computer Corp. OptiPlex GXI with 130 MB of RAM, one 1.2 GB SCSI-2 and three 3.2 GB SCSI-3 disk drives for mirror storage, and an Advanced Digital Information Corp. VLS-DLT autoloader. Our three protected servers consisted of a varied collection of hardware platforms ranging from a 200-MHz Pentium Pro with 130 MB of RAM running IntranetW are 4.11 to a 486/33 with 32 MB of RAM running NetWare 3.12. Testing involved high-volume data migrations using a copy of our SYS:SYSTEM\*.NLMs, while a variety of server-located common desktop applications and utilities were running on attached client workstations. Not All Mirrors Are Alike We found fundamental differences in the server mirroring approaches used by each vendor. These figure prominently in the products' performance (see "Breaking Out Two Basic Mirroring Product Types" on page 120). Another key feature of these four products is how well they all tie in with server backup. All of the systems we tested should work well with existing backup solutions. If you are using a backup system that's hosted on a NetWare server, then you can leverage the presence of your mirror server by hosting your backup process and mirroring process on the same server. This lets you back up your protected servers on the local mirrored copy of the data. Instead of running data across the wire, you'l l perform a local backup at bus speeds. Further, you can back up the data any time, without interrupting server usage. LANtegrity for NetWare's clean automation and configurability features made it a standout in our tests. But StandbyServer Many-to-One's tight integration with the NetWare NOS, automatic failover and seamless remirroring facilities helped it earn top honors in this roundup.

The NetWare mirroring featu res chart , in Acrobat format. For the Side Bar on Breaking Out Two Basic Mirroring Product Types Other Reviews Web-Based Teamware Lets Users Work in Concert By Nancy Cox