Lapeer County Ensures Its 911 Systems Stay in Operation With Neverfail

AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Neverfail®, a leading global software company specializing in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today announced that Lapeer County, Michigan is using Neverfail to ensure the continuous availability of its critical 911 systems.

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Lapeer County, which has a population of 90,000 and covers 663 square miles north of Detroit, worked with VisionAIR to select Neverfail to ensure the high availability of critical systems in the event of electrical storms, natural disasters or other catastrophes causing system overloads, failure or outages. Neverfail also protects Lapeer County's systems during smaller application outages or planned downtime.

During the summer of 2010, a violent electrical storm swept through Lapeer County, and lightning struck the county's emergency dispatch center and radio tower, knocking out power. Fortunately, the county had uninterruptable power supplies protecting the servers and emergency generators, so it could keep all emergency dispatch applications online.

However, powerful strikes can weaken systems causing them to fail later. The next afternoon, the server responsible for retaining all dispatch records crashed. After several attempts to restore the server were unsuccessful, the county got a spare server to re-install the applications. During the process to rebuild this server and get it back on line, the county's primary Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) server also failed. The CAD server, running VisionCAD™ provided by VisionAIR, is a vital link in the provision of emergency services to the public.

Fortunately, the VisionCAD system and Lapeer County's SQL database were protected against downtime through the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite, which maintained a second copy of the CAD system on an alternative server. Because the software monitors whether systems are working and available, it detected the failure of the primary server and immediately switched CAD operations to the secondary server. As a result, dispatch operations continued uninterrupted, never compromising public safety.

"Had we not installed Neverfail earlier in the year, our dispatchers would have had to manually write out and process each incoming emergency call with pen and paper. This process would have been time consuming and inefficient – severely hindering Lapeer County's ability to act on emergency calls," said Jeff Satkowski, systems administrator for Lapeer County's Central Dispatch. "For two weeks, we ran our dispatch services on the backup server, but eventually we were able to get the primary server fully online."

Once Lapeer County got its primary server back up and running, it worked closely with VisionAIR to load software, resynchronize data from the secondary server and then use Neverfail to switch live operations back to the primary system. Since installing Neverfail, Lapeer County conducts monthly tests when it is updating Microsoft Windows servers to make sure the primary server fails over and back seamlessly.

"Any downtime for organizations is simply unacceptable – and in Lapeer County's case, downtime with its 911 systems could literally mean life or death for someone. The Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite provides an easy, cost-effective way for organizations to ensure uptime during planned or unplanned downtime," said Bob Roudebush, vice president of marketing of Neverfail.

About Neverfail

Neverfail is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail's software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail's mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime, and enables the more productive use of IT resources. Neverfail, a US Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a consistent and active early adopter participant and contributor in all mission-critical Microsoft applications. It is also a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.

Neverfail is a trademark of Neverfail Group Limited. All other trademarks, including Microsoft, Windows, and Exchange, are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2009 Neverfail Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, or translated into any language or computer language, in any form or by any means without prior express, written consent of Neverfail Group Limited.

SOURCE Neverfail