The drive will come in orange, red, blue, clear, and gray colors, retailing for $24. Most of us are used to the sight of a small dongle hanging out of notebooks and computers, functioning as USB flash drives, but the diminutive number you see here from TopTechProducts was fashioned after a credit card (although you can’t swipe it), letting you carry it around in your wallet at all times. 1″ x 0. Too bad storage capacity maxes out at 4GB, although that should be considered more than enough for most users. It measures 3. The card itself can fold in half, and comes with a tiny USB connector that plugs into the computer. 11″ and works with Windows, Linux and Mac computers. 4″ x 2. 99 each.

As part of its constant aspiration to serve its members more efficiently and effectively, COMSTAR is always on the lookout for innovative technology, especially technology that can help ensure the uptime of its critical information systems.

Once WANSyncHA Exchange was installed on both master and replica servers, they proceeded to thoroughly test the product. Jones and his team built two Qsol servers with ICP Vortex disk controllers configured for RAID 5 and transferred the Exchange Information Store to them.

The final WANSyncHA Exchange deployment now continuously, replicates the Exchange Information Store from COMSTAR’s primary server to the credit union’s colocation site over WAN in real time. Testing included numerous complete restores of the Information Store between the two servers, as well as switchovers using WANSyncHA’s High Availability feature.

“WANSyncHA Exchange has proven extremely easy to deploy. “We also appreciate the added cost-efficiency afforded by the fact that no additional Microsoft Exchange server licenses need be acquired to implement this solution. It required neither server reboots nor Exchange client shutdowns. Following our positive experience with WANSyncHA Exchange, we implemented additional WANSync solutions–WANSync Server for our duplicate NAS servers and WANSyncCD for safe and accurate distribution of our internal and external Web content. “

The level of support we received from XOsoft was outstanding and factored heavily in our decision to use WANSyncHA,” said Jones. We have achieved great peace of mind, knowing that WANSyncHA will significantly decrease potential downtime in case of a disaster and that little or no information will be lost in the process.

We needed a solution to facilitate realtime replication of – the Information Store for our Microsoft Exchange servers. As a financial institution, COMSTAR is in a unique situation in that data may literally equal money and certain data simply must not be lost. “When a – customer sends a request or an inquiry through e-mail, we need to be 100 percent certain that we receive that email. “Communicating with our customers via e-mail is critical to the success of our business today,” said Stephen Jones, vice president of information systems at COMSTAR.

As e-mail has become a crucial element in the way COMSTAR interacts with its members, the credit union’s IT personnel were charged with the task of choosing and deploying a solution that would maintain the constant availability of its Microsoft Exchange server infrastructure.

The Complete Solution

WANSyncHA Provides Uninterrupted Exchange Server Availability

We needed to investigate technologies that would enable immediate switchover in case of server failure. “

We also hoped to locate a solution that would offer stability and WAN-based replication to our co-location site that would allow us to throttle bandwidth. “We decided that the time it takes to restore backups from disk or tape and the potential for losing messages sent since our most recent backup would have an adverse impact on our members.

Data Availability Over WAN

The WANSyncHA solution chosen by the COMSTAR is an advanced WAN-based application availability software platform. Should a server fail or have to be shut down for maintenance, either a local or a geographically remote WANSyncHA replica can instantaneously and automatically take its place to provide the fastest path to recovery. WANSyncHA maintains identical replicas of complete application servers through continuous real-time replication and provides peerless, high application availability with application-aware automatic failover over LAN and WAN in case of disaster.

2; LeftHand Networks’ SAN/iQ Software; Remote IP Copy Software and NSM 200 SAN Module combination; NSI Software’s Double-Take for Windows 4. Jones began his search and came across an independent review that tested four high-availability products for Microsoft’s Exchange Server. Since that was Jones’ primary objective, he looked into WANSyncHA along with a few other major players in the market. 3; and Xosoft’s WANSyncHA Exchange 3. 5. 1. The winner in this review was XOsoft’s WANSyncHA, which did not drop any messages during failover. 2 Build 45. The test included: Fujitsu/Softek’s Softek Replicator 2.

WANSyncHA Delivers

“WANSyncHA’s Exchange-aware, high-performance replication was the key deciding factor, but we also found the simplicity with which it would complement our existing disaster recovery infrastructure highly appealing”. COMSTAR found the ideal combination of reasonable cost and performance in XOsoft’s WANSyncHA Exchange.

Jones knows what he’s doing when it comes to protecting his company’s data. Prior to implementing WANSyncHA, Jones deployed Adonis DNS Appliances from BlueCat Networks in order to isolate the IP addresses provided for their critical servers at co-locations by having them correspond to the name server at each physical location. That, coupled with short TTL’s for each record, enables COMSTAR to have a seamless failover from one location to the other in the event one of their Internet connections should fail. Their name server, using the Internet connection that is down, will simply be unavailable and is thus unable to distribute the addresses on the subnet that are affected by the outage.

This leaves the name server at their co-location to answer all queries with the address set that is currently available and if both connections are working, it load-balances between locations using the round-robin method.

With the economic crunch yet to be fully realized around the globe, here we have a symbol of one of many instruments that helped usher in the current dark days – the credit card.

Word has it this is but a concept at this point in time, although it would be cool to see this one roll off manufacturing lines in due time. Yes, it is an MP3 player that comes in almost a similar form factor as a credit card, and where the magnetic strip is supposed to be lies an LCD display. Good thing this one doesn’t allow you to break your bank limit and plunge you further into wanton debt, but instead it aims to soothe your jangled nerves at watching your favorite stocks plunge without a parachute by playing your favorite tunes.

Then register for FREE to our feeds!

However, there is another way to get an account on the App Store without being forced to provide this information (among other things, not everyone has a credit card).

Well, sure it has, for the majority of the software available in the store. Have you ever tried to register the App Store from any Apple portable device? Or maybe yes? If you did, you certainly found out that you can not do it without entering a credit card number. Download applications from the App Store, is priceless!

The procedure