As fall approaches, IT departments are gearing up to make decisions about new technology investments and many struggle with how to evaluate the options. It's hard to separate hype and reality. Over the years, we at Neverfail have developed a set of questions to help customers determine what kind of continuous availability and disaster recovery solution is best for them. We tell them to ask themselves, will the solution:

• perform a failover that is transparent to the user (i.e. end users do not need to reboot or restart applications)
• check the overall health of the server prior to installation?
• provide an installation process that does not require the failover server to be manually pre-configured?
• offer complete data protection - ensure both the data and the registry can be rolled back?
• protect from all types of failures (data corruption or data loss, operating system performance, network issues and hardware issues)?
• work in a WAN environment?
• offer both a manual and automatic failover/failback?
• prove easy to maintain for upgrades, failovers and switchbacks?
• protect the primary application (e.g. Exchange) AND the auxiliary applications "out-of-the-box," such as anti-virus, archiving, back-up, anti-spam, and fax products?
• allow for comprehensive failover testing - including the application, Active Directory, DNS updates and network connectivity?

For a more comprehensive follow-up set of questions, visit the neverfail Web site at http://www.neverfailgroup.com/resources/faq.aspx.
Enjoy the rest of August. - Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail