High Availability Overview

EFT 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 with HA can:

  • Maintain availability through any planned or unplanned outage

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

  • Enhance throughput and better meet important SLAs by deploying multiple nodes of EFT 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's active-active deployment provides HA using multiple instances of EFT and a load balancer for non-stop availability of your network. And unlike active-passive failover clusters, all of the nodes in EFT'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 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™) 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.

Cluster Types Supported

Cluster Type Supported?
Traditional Active-Active cluster in same LAN Yes
Primary and DR Site Active-Active cluster (configuration kept mostly in sync) Yes
Active-Active cluster deployed in the cloud as a static cluster; Support with Windows tools and guidance, but no support on cloud infrastructure or services Yes
Active-Passive cluster using Microsoft Clustering Services Yes
Active-Passive cluster using unicast or multicast; Requires email confirmation from customer to account manager that they will be using in failover capacity only Yes
Active-Active cluster deployed in the cloud as a dynamic, autoscaling cluster; General guidance and recommendations, but no active support No
Distributed Active-Active cluster (GLBS or Geocluster) No