Reduces cost, increases productivity, and provides error-free business continuity for complex, multi-tiered applications

• Reduces the costs and impacts on your business caused by unplanned or planned downtime
• Improves the effectiveness of your business continuity plans by managing and automating the activities required to restart and relocate application and data services
• Replaces error-prone manual activities required for IP management during a wide area failover
• Supports DAS, NAS, LAN, WAN, and SAN
• Provides full failback service to quickly restart the business after the primary site recovers
• Notifies designated personnel of any failure or indication of impending failure
• Integrated with EMC replication technologies for full application and data continuity management
• Integrated VMware support provides high availability to businesses consolidating their server environments

Application failover automation and management during unplanned and planned outages. In the event of an application resource failure, site disaster, or planned service disruption, EMC AutoStart automates the restart process of your application and data services on an alternate local or remote server. AutoStart also automates the failback of your services, application, and data; managing both failover directions ensures consistent and error-free business continuity. A critical component of EMC's replication and continuity strategy, AutoStart takes advantage of EMC's best-of-breed replication technologies, enabling customers to eliminate lengthy or unexpected outages and downtime.

Benefits and Features
With EMC AutoStart, your applications and data are protected and remain available whether your operations rely on a single data center or many data centers around the world.

• Heterogeneous applications - Supports multi-operating system clusters, ensuring your most complicated, critical, and distributed applications-such as ERP and CRM-receive the highest level of availability protection. AutoStart raises application availability, lowers personnel costs.
• Global management console - Offers anywhere, anytime management of complex, global availability domains.
• Tight integration with EMC replication solutions - Couples business data and applications to ensure your business keeps running, even in the face of major disasters, particularly during remote replicated site failovers. Automating complex failover activities at this level eliminate potential human errors.
• Automated notifications to appropriate personnel - Completely conforms to your business policies and continuity plans, enabling you to decide how, or whether, to involve human operators in the recovery process.
• IP management during failovers and failbacks using preferred IP management solutions - Facilitates error-free switchover when wide area IP management failures occur by automating complicated tasks and removing operator involvement from highly stressful situations.
• Management and failover based on your business continuity plans and policies - Flexibly accommodates the implementation of your defined continuity plans no matter what steps are needed to eliminate downtime from your applications and infrastructure.

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Details

Enterprise-wide restart solution covers applications and data
AutoStart works with EMC replication technologies to manage the data replication and application restart process. When a primary site fails, AutoStart seamlessly transfers control of storage resources to a remote facility and restarts the application. You can configure the failover process to conform to your company's continuity policies, choosing to restart services automatically or require operator intervention.

Monitors, broadcasts, and triggers events
AutoStart monitors servers, networks, and data. When it detects an error, or the violation of a parameter that you have established, AutoStart executes user-defined steps - such as notifying appropriate personnel or automatically remedying the problem - that keep your applications up and running. AutoStart provides simple application restart on a local or remote server, depending on whether data has been replicated to a local or remote site.

Integrated IP infrastructure enables true wide area clusters and manages critical IP failover
AutoStart can route heartbeats through DNS, subnets, and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) links, making it the ideal solution for managing wide area availability and application restarts. Its cluster heartbeat and server-to-server communication facility is based on IP communications, a critical factor in enabling true wide area clusters. Additionally, the AutoStart trigger-and-rules facility integrates with your IP management tools of choice to automate and manage IP failover; the most complex and, if handled manually, typically the most error-prone portion of your business continuity plan.

Supports complex, multi-tiered applications and environments
Today's enterprise applications (such as ERP and CRM) can comprise a number of smaller applications (such as personnel and accounting), each with its own function, yet each dependent on all the others. Complicating matters, these applications and their databases may run on different hardware platforms and operating systems. AutoStart is designed for these federated environments and it supports heterogeneous clusters, in conjunction with SRDF Consistency Groups, to ensure continued applications availability. AutoStart also supports standard and enterprise editions of Microsoft applications and most Sun Microsystems Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Windows, and Linux server tiers.

Supports VMware to consolidate and protect Microsoft Windows server environments
You can leverage AutoStart in a VMware ESX Server virtual environment to cost-effectively consolidate your server environment and protect your Microsoft Windows applications from the common causes of downtime. Your AutoStart and VMware solution functions in a number of critical configurations: Multi-virtual-machine to multi-virtualmachine environment within the local data center; physical to virtual environment within the local data center; and physical to virtual environment over wide area networks with EMC replication.

Manages enterprise business continuity globally
AutoStart's global management console provides easy point-and-click access to major AutoStart functions, enabling you to manage your availability environment from anywhere within that environment. This interface is especially valuable for managing planned and unplanned downtime in wide area replicated site infrastructures. AutoStart supports heterogeneous clusters, which you can manage from anywhere on any platform running any operating system.

Tight integration with EMC data replication solution protects against outages and ensures validity of recovery plans
AutoStart tightly integrates with EMC replication technologies, EMC SRDF/S, SRDF/A, and RepliStor. This integration ensures world-class availability for both your data and applications. By controlling the movement of data and applications from one site to another at the click of a button, regardless of distance, an AutoStart and EMC replication solution is the ideal platform for protecting your environment during outages and testing your disaster recovery scenario.

For example, prior to bringing applications online during downtime, AutoStart ensures that SRDF R2s are in a synchronized or consistent state and verifies there are no invalid tracks owed to the R2. If the primary storage site is available, AutoStart will redirect the data replication after performing a failover operation. This enables you to test disaster recovery procedures while replicating changes back to the primary site. It also ensures, in case of a disaster, that replication continues and will be re-directed from the secondary site back to the primary site (if the primary site is available). To further protect against data toss, AutoStart displays a warning status if data replication is halted.

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Requirements

To run AutoStart in a Windows environment, each machine in the domain must meet the following requirements:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2003.
• Minimum of 32 MB RAM.
• Minimum of 55 MB free disk space.
• A DNS server must be used for hostname resolution.
• DHCP cannot be used in the network configuration.
• 16-bit VGA colour mode is not supported by the Availability Console.

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