As a very brief introduction, I'm responsible for product management at Neverfail and am happy to answer any questions that anybody has about the Neverfail for BES solution (and more specifically, how it compliments BES 5 HA). As a warning to the reader - this post is going to be quite lengthy, but hopefully it will provide answers to most of your questions all in one place.
To begin with, I'll start by saying that the BES 5 HA solution looks very interesting in terms of providing protection for BES itself - much of the core monitoring and failover capabilities that one would expect from an HA solution seem to have been considered in BES HA.
Having said that, at Neverfail we think it's of utmost importance to consider HA/DR as it relates not just to a single application, but to the entire application ecosystem. Most BES configurations, at a minimum, require SQL Server on the back end (for the BES configuration DB) as well as a mail server (Exchange, Domino, Groupwise). Clearly if any one of those components fails, the ability to send and receive mobile email is compromised. Thus for a highly available mobility environment, all 3 of the legs of this mobility tripod must be covered with an availability solution. One advantage that Neverfail brings to the table is our ability (proven through over a decade of experience in HA/DR) to provide a fully integrated, seamless availability environment which protects all of the above. Rather than learning 3 different HA solutions to cover BES, SQL, and messaging, our customers find it much easier to simply learn 1 solution (built by a company that does nothing BUT HA/DR).
Furthermore, one most consider the complexities of failover in a geographically distributed environment (e.g. across a WAN for DR purposes). Although not precisely designed with DR in mind, imagine deploying BES 5 HA with the standby server across a WAN. If that server experiences a temporary issue and must be failed over, it will now have to communicate with a SQL server and messaging server across a WAN link, most likely with a fair amount of latency. As our experience has shown us, BES doesn't work well if too much latency exists between the BES server and other components (RIM recommends maintaining no more than a 35 millisecond ping time between the BES and messaging sever). What is required, and what Neverfail offers, if a fully coordinated failover of the entire application ecosystem. If and when one server (BES, SQL, or messaging) fails over, Neverfail can automatically bring the other servers across with it, thus ensuring that the entire mobile messaging infrastructure continues to work. Of course failback to the original servers is just as simple - a single click of a button.
For those of you looking for both HA and DR (local failover PLUS remote failover), keep in mind that BES 5 HA simply does not offer this. The 2N design of BES HA means that you only get a single failover node for each BES server. More often than not, we find that most companies actually want both local HA for BES as well as remote DR from a single solution. Neverfail can either provide this out of the box, or by layering Neverfail (for DR) on top of BES 5 (for HA), you can achieve this type of solution.
Of course no comparison would be complete without considering the total cost of ownership. In order to deploy BES 5 HA, companies that house BES and SQL on the same physical server will now need to re-architect their environment, since BES 5 HA requires that SQL be located on a separate physical server. The SQL server itself will require a 2nd redundant server of course, plus the requisite purchase of Windows Enterprise and SQL Enterprise editions (to achieve automatic failover using SQL mirroring). One BES server has now become 4 servers, and one OS license (standard) and one SQL license (standard) has now become 2 enterprise licenses of each. On the other hand, Neverfail does not require that SQL be separated out onto a separate server from BES, and Neverfail works with the standard versions of the OS and SQL - thus a Neverfail deployment would only require 2 total servers, 1 standard OS license (and in fact no additional SQL license, since MS doesn’t require a 2nd license when used by vendors like Neverfail, specifically for HA/DR purposes).
(One final functional difference to mention, which might only be important to some companies but not all - since BES 5 HA offers no replication functionality, the BES logs stored locally on the BES server are not protected. For companies concerned with any form of audits, this could be a critical issue. Neverfail provides replication (as well as data rollback) of all BES data located on the BES server, including registry settings as well as BES logs, thus protecting you from any form of data loss that might affect your business.)
I'm happy to answer any additional questions that any of you might have...
-John Posavatz
-VP, Product Management
-Neverfail
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