Neverfail Delivers Life-Saving Continuous Availability Solutions to Louisiana Organ Donation Agency

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Keeping critical lines of communication open is vital for the Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency (LOPA) as it rushes to recover and place organ and tissue donations throughout the state. The agency can not afford email downtime under any circumstances -- even those wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. During that time, the agency's Exchange email was down for weeks, and they were unable to effectively coordinate with their regional offices and networked hospitals throughout the state.

"We had a disaster recovery plan in place," says Max Prather, IT Manager of LOPA, the only federally-designated organ procurement organization in the state. "However, no plan we had developed could stand up to the extent of the damage of a complete disaster. The 2005 hurricane season was a real eye-opener. We realized that protecting our lines of communication was vital to our entire operation."

Headquartered in Metairie, La., less than ten miles outside of New Orleans, the threat of Hurricane Katrina forced LOPA to evacuate its headquarters, dispersing its employees around the state and beyond. After the storm, the IT staff was tasked with salvaging minimally damaged or undamaged hardware, moving it to Lafayette and reestablishing dependable lines of communications with steady data flow. Three weeks later, however, Hurricane Rita forced LOPA to once again relocate, this time to Shreveport.

Without a robust disaster recovery plan for continuous email availability, LOPA's issues had never been more time-sensitive, since the viability of organ donation is decreased by the minute. An hour of downtime can have a tremendous effect on the entire process. Following this experience, LOPA selected Neverfail for Exchange to protect its email environment from both natural and technical disruptions. According to Prather, "Neverfail for Microsoft(R) Exchange provides us with a 100 percent guarantee that our email will be available whenever we need it, regardless of physical circumstances. There is no loss of data, Exchange email never stops flowing, and the process is invisible to users."

Neverfail for Exchange monitors the health of an organization's entire sever environment. In the event of any type disruption from scheduled maintenance to a Category 5 hurricane, a system failover can be initiated to LOPA's secondary environment in Shreveport. Users are seamlessly connected to the secondary site and are not required to even restart their Exchange email applications. Once the issues have been resolved, users are redirected back to the primary email environment to continue working. The entire process is transparent to the end user, allowing the IT staff to manage the actual cause of the disturbance rather than end-user concerns.

"We are proud to deliver the most comprehensive and user-friendly disaster recovery solutions," said Dave French, Neverfail Americas CEO. "With health organizations like LOPA, lives depend on continuous availability to applications such as email. We will continue to play a vital role in helping companies such as LOPA proactively manage and protect mission-critical applications, such as Exchange, at all times."

About the Neverfail Group

The Neverfail Group is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, "cluster-class" high application availability, and disaster recovery solutions for the Windows-based technology platform. 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. More information can be found at http://www.neverfailgroup.com/.

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