Endeavour has implemented another milestone technology as part of its ongoing Reliability Plus project. Endeavour already boast a level of reliability that far surpasses similar service providers and is commited to consolidate this advantage even further.

Already Endeavour carefully monitors production systems and sends warnings for immediate action if preset warning levels are reached. Manual profiling of production systems is also regularly carried out to examine performance parameters and resource usage and ensure smooth and proper functionality of all sub-systems.

Endeavour has now taken a major step forward by building into its platform an internal performance profiling system. Systems such as the MPI or the payment gateway (www.cardpaydirect.com) are now able to monitor the performance of all the internal sub-systems within and to automatically identify and pinpoint functions which perform poorly or consume too many resources. The monitoring is accurate enough to distinguish between time consumed on internal logic and time consumed on external systems such as database reads.

In addition, the existing activity reporting system has been updated. For example, on the payment gateway, the activity reporting system keeps track of all actions carried out by a merchant while logged in on the merchant interface. The activity report now records accurate performce data such as the time taken for running a report and also how the time consumed was divided between retrieving data from database and manipulating and presenting the report data. Again, Endeavour platforms will now automatically detect operations that require an above average time to complete.

This technology will enable Endeavour to run faster and more stable systems and will also ensure that issues are identified quickly, with minimum effort for Endeavour and greater satisfaction for our clients. Endeavour is commited to delivering 100% reliability and will continue to commit resources and technical expertise towards achieving this goal.

Endeavour's systems are designed at the core to operate in cluster mode. Clustering goes beyond simple fail over, ensuring that an operation in progress will be seamlessly continued by another server if need be. This level of reliability cannot be provided by simple off the shelf configuration but has to be built into the core of the applications such that deployments on different systems are in constant communication and able to communicate their status and fail over without ever dropping the ball.

Databases also play a critical role in achieving high availability. A number of years back Endeavour developed its own database replication technology; as a consequence of running its own technology, Endeavour is able to achieve unprecedented level of control and flexibility in addition to achieving the primary goal of attaining reliability and safe guarding of data. Endeavour's database replication technology enables it to replicate between different data centers and to also operate the replication database in live mode if required.

Achieving High Availability and Reliability goes beyond doing just enough to be able to jump on the latest hype band wagon. The reality for many organizations is to postpone changes for as long as possible (sometimes years), literally embracing a policy of stagnation. Regular downtime when scheduled is taken as necessary and, when forced by circumstances, as unavoidable. The dilemma is the same as that faced by a race car driver choosing between making a pit stop or continue driving a car that is gradually deteriorating.

Endeavour's technological excellence has achieved a paradigm shift to this very common problem: by taking on and solving the many complex technical challenges, the seemingly irreconcilable objectives of avoiding interruptions and ongoing deployments/optimization have actually been made complementary.