Press release

Argos, the UK's leading catalogue retailer, has chosen SavWare HA from Sire Technology Group, as it's high availability solution of choice. SavWare HA will reduce unplanned downtime at the company's stores, providing round-the-clock protection for the back end processors that run Argos' store applications.

Having recently upgraded their operating systems, Argos needed a high availability solution that would not only run on SCO UnixWare 7 but that would also enable them to protect their considerable investment in hardware. SavWare HA was found to offer Argos the best solution to meet these needs.

SavWare HA is a hardware-independant, off-the-shelf software solution that allows a standby system to mirror the application server - whether it services the entire business entity or just the critical applications. SavWare Ha links servers together in a high availability cluster so that if one fails, users are switched to an alternative server. Since all disk transactions have been mirrored to the alternative server, no data is lost and users experience minimal down time. SavWare HA's architecture offers full server independence and allows either system, Primary or Standby, to be disconnected fully, for planned maintenance etc., without affecting network operation.

"As companies measure downtime not just in lost revenues and productivity but also in loss of customer confidence, ensuring good protection is a key issue for businesses today," says Barry Kiddell, director of Sire Technology. "In SavWare HA, our clients have a reliable, cost-effective way to continuously stay online and in business."

"We needed a solution provider that we could rely on to deploy an enterprise-wide high availability solution, and Sire certainly has a lot of expertise in this area," said an Argos spokesperson. "In SavWare HA, we have found a solution that is not only functional and cost-effective but also easy to install, operate, customise and support. I am convinced that SavWare HA is the best solution to meet our needs on the market today."

SavWare HA runs on SCO UnixWare 7, all versions of OpenServer and SCO Unix 3.2v4.x.