The winner of the Silver Award for SearchWinSystems.com's Storage Management Software Products of the Year was the Neverfail High Availability Solution from Neverfail Group. The company claims its software, which provides disaster recovery solutions for Microsoft's technology platform, is the only "cluster-class," high-availability solution to proactively monitor the health of the entire environment. It keeps an eye on applications, operating systems, server hardware, configurations, the network infrastructure and more.

Rated highly by the judges in the areas of functionality, performance and ease of use, the Neverfail product allows administrators to automatically conduct a complete assessment of a server's configuration and environment. In addition, it keeps all users seamlessly connected to key applications and moves workload back and forth between primary and secondary servers.

The Neverfail High Availability Solution can be configured for either a LAN or WAN environment, and it's simple to operate. For example, it allows users to resynchronize servers (when the primary server comes back online) with a click of a button.

Another key component is the Server Check Optimization Performance Evaluation (SCOPE), which provides information about the current running state of a server environment. SCOPE also offers recommendations to establish an optimum platform for long-term reliability.

Pricing: The Neverfail price is based on the server in the pair with the greatest number of CPUs. The product's Heartbeat component costs $4,400 for a single-CPU server; $6,160 for a dual-CPU server; and $7,920 for a server with four or more CPUs. Application modules for specific environments cost $1,100 for a single-CPU server; $1,540 for a dual-CPU server; and $1,980 for one with four or more CPUs. The SCOPE Analysis costs $1,000 extra. The company also charges a 20% annual maintenance fee.

SearchWinSystems.com editors