High Availability Solutions

IMPORTANT NOTICE 26th October 2006:
Please be aware that Prior IT Solutions (August 1998 to August 2006) has been closed down and no longer operates as a Limited company and is therefore no longer doing business under the name of Prior IT Solutions Ltd. This web site will remain active for the time being to inform customers of this situation, and for purposes of continuity because it also has links to personal web sites.

As you will see from our previous customers section, Prior IT has provided mission critical high availability solutions to several prestigious customers utilising the Hewlett Packard product MC/ServiceGuard, and Digital Unix ASE (Available Server Environment);

Vodafone
Cable & Wireless
Walkers Snacks
Swire Blanch Financials
NOKIA Telecommunications
Barclays Life Assurance
ICI Performance Chemicals
Glaxo Wellcome

The most exciting and challenging was for the Vodafone mobile phone network UNIBILL Project, incorporating 16 HP Servers, 4 dedicated failover servers with multiple failure scenarios, transaction processing software, cutting-edge fibre-channel technology, EMC disk arrays and plans for a complete disaster recovery system.

Due to the nature of high-availability systems which require many methods of monitoring software and hardware states, these projects required close liaison with multiple teams to ensure correct communication and transfer of control whenever any critical item failed.

In such a failure situation its redundant counterpart would take over control and the monitoring software alerts support staff so that remedial action can be taken.

Designing such systems requires careful analysis, and a broad overview of the many aspects of potential system failures, at whatever level - software, hardware or network.