Building on the high availability and local application management that clustering provides, VERITAS Software's VERITAS Global Cluster Manager extends the concepts of local clustering to provide peerless global application-fail-over capabilities. VERITAS Global Cluster Manager can migrate entire data centers in the event of a site disaster. According to Marty Ward, VERITAS's director of product marketing, "No other product is as committed to providing automation for a complete site failover of your mission-critical applications and data and achieving immediate recovery at a secondary site."
VERITAS Global Cluster Manager is a centralized Web-based solution that lets you monitor and manage global availability for nearly any application running on any major platform. The product also manages the availability of application-dependent resources and monitors third-party replication processes. Because VERITAS Global Cluster Manager provides automated application and data-access failover, the user experience is seamless, resulting in no noticeable interruption of computing services. Ward said, "By automating the disaster-recovery process, Global Cluster Manager dramatically reduces the recovery time objective from days or hours to a matter of minutes."
Although the majority of VERITAS Global Cluster Manager customers buy the product for its unique disaster-recovery approach, many others find value in its application-administration features. According to David Kwan, VERITAS's product marketing manager, "Global Cluster Manager lets you use a secured Web-based console to manage the health status of your data center environment—from anywhere—regardless of your company's geographic distribution."
Asked why he thinks Windows & .NET Magazine readers voted VERITAS Global Cluster Manager the Most Innovative Product, Ward said, "Our customers strive for the simplicity of automation. Administrators aren't worried about seeing their jobs go obsolete in the face of automated software. They just want to simplify certain tasks and scale in a cost-effective way."