High Availability Overview

EFT Enterprise’s High Availability (HA) solution can protect your critical business processes and ensure that crucial file transfer systems are always on, and that employees, customers, and business partners experience seamless availability of critical applications and information.

EFT Enterprise with HA can:

  • Maintain availability through any planned or unplanned outage

  • Increase stability and flexibility by implementing multiple nodes of EFT Enterprise for load balancing

  • Enhance throughput and better meet important SLAs by deploying multiple nodes of EFT Enterprise to allow the collective environment to use more available resources

  • Improve scalability with the ability to share common configurations across nodes, eliminating the challenge of having multiple servers set up with different configurations

EFT Enterprise’s active-active deployment provides HA using multiple instances of EFT Enterprise and a load balancer for non-stop availability of your network. And unlike active-passive failover clusters, all of the nodes in EFT Enterprise’s active-active deployment are put to work in production—with no standby hardware, and no clustering software.

Interoperable with Common Load Balancers

With EFT Enterprise HA, you can control spikes in network traffic, minimize scalability limitations, and maximize the efficiency of large and complex environments. Globalscape’s high availability solution is compatible with most major load balancers.

In addition, Globalscape is a member of the F5® Technology Alliance Program, providing a proven managed file transfer solution for interoperability of F5 BIG IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (BIG-IP LTM®) with Globalscape’s managed file transfer platform, Enhanced File Transfer™ (EFT™) Enterprise with High Availability (HA), to secure enterprise data at rest and in transit, without interruption.

What’s the difference between active-active and active-passive load balancing?

  • An active-active cluster is typically made up of at least two nodes, both actively running the same kind of service simultaneously. The main purpose of an active-active cluster is to achieve load balancing. Load balancing distributes workloads across all nodes to prevent any single node from getting overloaded. Because there are more nodes available to serve, there will also be a marked improvement in throughput and response times.

  • Like the active-active configuration, active-passive also consists of at least two nodes. However, as the name "active-passive" implies, not all nodes are going to be active. In the case of two nodes, for example, if the first node is already active, the second node must be passive or on standby. The passive (a.k.a. failover) server serves as a backup that's ready to take over as soon as the active (a.k.a. primary) server gets disconnected or is unable to serve.