Vodafone's BlackBerries get disaster shield

Vodafone is to offer its BlackBerry customers a high availability and disaster recovery service, good news for corporates who live in fear of losing email access on the platform.
Based on Neverfail's disaster recovery technology, the Vodafone Neverfail High Availability Service for BlackBerry monitors the health of the entire email environment, including the server hardware, the network infrastructure, the application and the operating system.

If any anomalies are identified, the service should immediately take action to prevent loss of service. The service promises to operate 24/7 every day of the year.

According to Vodafone, the service will either automatically attempt to restart applications before they fail, switch over to a secondary server, or alert the IT staff so that no downtime or loss of service is experienced. Once the issue is resolved, they are automatically switched back to the main servers and neither users nor administrators are required to restart their applications. The service requires no SAN or Cluster technology, and supports LAN and WAN technology.

Vodafone BlackBerry provides users with secure access to their corporate email, as well as additional features including corporate data access, wireless email and calendar synchronization and remote address lookup. Other features include attachment viewing, enabling 'Out Of Office' and secure Internet access through your corporate environment. BlackBerry uses push technology to deliver data to remote devices via the Vodafone GPRS network. This is secured using 3DES or AES end-to-end encryption.

At the moment there are no plans to roll out the Vodafone Neverfail High Availability Service for non-BlackBerry devices. Vodafone Managed Services will work in partnership with Neverfail in the U.K. to offer customers capabilities such as continuous availability for mobile devices and communications solutions from RIM, Microsoft and IBM Lotus Notes.

"By adding Neverfail's solution into our Managed Service portfolio, we can offer enormous service expertise to protect critical parts of our customers' IT infrastructure," said Curt Hopkins, Head of Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Vodafone UK.

"Rather than just providing handsets and airtime minutes, Vodafone is offering strategic services, such as high availability, to support the entire BlackBerry platform," said Richard Ruddlesden, EMEA channel director, Neverfail.