SafeKit: All-in-One SANless High Availability & Application Clustering Software

What is SafeKit?

SafeKit is an all-in-one high availability software solution that ensures 100% application uptime by combining real-time host-based replication , automatic failover , and load balancing into a single package.

By synchronizing data between standard servers, SafeKit eliminates the need for expensive shared storage (SAN) or specialized IT skills, providing a simple, cost-effective way to protect enterprise databases (like SQL Server), critical security systems (like Milestone XProtect Video Management Software), and SCADA industrial control software (like Siemens applications) across both Windows and Linux environments.

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🔍 SafeKit High Availability Navigation Hub

Explore SafeKit: Features, technical videos, documentation, and free trial

Resource Type	Description	Direct Link
Key Features	Why Choose SafeKit for Simple and Cost-Effective High Availability?	See Why Choose SafeKit for High Availability
Use Cases	Explore How SafeKit Ensures the High Availability of Critical Infrastructure	See All Use Cases (OEM Software, Edge Servers, SCADA, and more)
Deployment Model	All-in-One SANless HA: Shared-Nothing Software Clustering	See SafeKit All-in-One SANless HA
HA Strategies	SafeKit: Infrastructure (VM) vs. Application-Level High Availability	See SafeKit HA & Redundancy: VM vs. Application Level
Technical Specifications	Technical Limitations for SafeKit Clustering	See SafeKit High Availability Limitations
Proof of Concept	SafeKit: High Availability Configuration & Failover Demos	See SafeKit Failover Tutorials
Architecture	How the SafeKit Mirror Cluster works (Real-Time Replication & Failover)	See SafeKit Mirror Cluster: Real-Time Replication & Failover
Architecture	How the SafeKit Farm Cluster works (Network Load Balancing & Failover)	See SafeKit Farm Cluster: Network Load Balancing & Failover
Competitive Advantages	Comparison: SafeKit vs. Traditional High Availability (HA) Clusters	See SafeKit vs. Traditional HA Cluster Comparison
Technical Resources	SafeKit High Availability: Documentation, Downloads & Trial	See SafeKit HA Free Trial & Technical Documentation
Pre-configured Solutions	SafeKit Application Module Library: Ready-to-Use HA Solutions	See SafeKit High Availability Application Modules

Why Choose SafeKit for Simple and Cost-Effective High Availability?

What are SafeKit’s features?

SafeKit provides the following features for Windows and Linux in a single software product:

Load balancing
Synchronous real-time file replication
Automatic application failover
Automatic failback after a server failure

Do I need special skills to set up SafeKit?

No. SafeKit is simple to deploy—no advanced expertise required.

Does SafeKit require additional hardware?

No. SafeKit runs on your existing servers, virtual machines, or in the cloud—no shared disks or SAN storage needed.

Are extra software licenses required for SafeKit?

No. SafeKit works with standard Windows and Linux editions and does not need enterprise database licenses.

What problems does SafeKit solve?

SafeKit solves:

Hardware failures (20% of problems), including the complete failure of a computer room
Software failures (40% of problems), including restart of critical processes
Human errors (40% of problems) thanks to its ease of use

Which applications are supported by SafeKit?

You can implement real-time replication and failover for:

All types of applications, file directories, and services
Databases
Complete Hyper-V or KVM virtual machines
Docker, Podman, and cloud applications

How does SafeKit cut costs?

SafeKit eliminates the following requirements:

Network load balancers or dedicated proxy servers
Shared disks or replicated SAN storage
Enterprise editions of operating systems and databases
Specialized cluster maintenance skills

How is SafeKit High Availability priced and licensed?

SafeKit features a transparent, cost-effective per-node licensing model based strictly on the number of servers, regardless of CPU cores or sockets. Unlike many high-availability competitors that mandate recurring subscriptions, SafeKit offers perpetual licenses to ensure a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and long-term software assets.

No Hidden Costs: All pre-configured HA application modules are provided free of charge.
Risk-Free Evaluation: Download a 30-day free trial to test failover and replication in your environment.
Customized Quotes: Please contact us for a quote tailored to your specific high availability requirements.

SafeKit Use Cases

SafeKit for OEM

Offering high availability with your application increases business value by ensuring continuous service, reducing downtime risks, and enhancing customer trust, while enabling critical operations to run without interruption on standard infrastructures.

Add SafeKit in your catalog as a high availability option: a software-only solution tailored to your application, with no hidden costs such as shared storage, fully hardware-agnostic, and deployable on physical, virtual, or cloud environments, with simple plug-and-play administration.

SafeKit for Edge

Edge sites often have no data center and no HA expertise—yet business continuity is critical. SafeKit keeps edge applications running in factories, oil platforms, ships, building security, air traffic control, 5G networks, healthcare, retail…

SafeKit turns two standard edge servers (any brand) into a plug‑and‑play HA cluster—no shared storage/SAN. One lightweight stack delivers real‑time replication and automatic failover (and can also include load balancing), easy to install and administer.

SafeKit for VMS

Video Management Software (VMS) is critical to public safety, recording and displaying live and archived video so security officers can react instantly to incidents. Any VMS outage directly puts people and assets at risk.

SafeKit prevents video loss and monitoring gaps by maintaining continuous access to live and recorded streams, even during server or software failures. It integrates seamlessly with leading VMS platforms such as Milestone, Genetec, Hanwha , and others to keep surveillance operational when it matters most.

SafeKit for EACS

Electronic Access Control Systems (EACS) are essential to physical security, controlling and monitoring access to private and sensitive areas through doors, badges, readers, and sensors. Any system outage can immediately expose people, buildings, and assets to intrusion.

SafeKit keeps access control decisions, alarms, and credentials available at all times by eliminating single points of failure. It delivers resilient operation for EACS solutions such as Hirsch Microsesame, Nedap AEOS, and Siemens SiPass , ensuring secure access even during infrastructure incidents.

SafeKit for SCADA

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are at the core of industrial environments, enabling operators to monitor and control critical processes through sensors, valves, pumps, motors, and human‑machine interfaces.

SafeKit minimizes production downtime by ensuring SCADA control systems—such as those powering Probat coffee roasters and ALSTEF baggage sorting machines —remain operational despite hardware or software incidents. This allows operators to retain full visibility and control of industrial processes at all times, preventing costly shutdowns and safety risks.

SafeKit for BMS

Building Management Systems (BMS) are central to modern buildings, providing automated control of HVAC, electrical distribution, lighting, fire safety, and water systems. Any system outage can directly impact occupant safety, comfort, and building operations.

SafeKit safeguards building automation by allowing BMS services to continue running transparently in the event of a failure. It supports platforms such as Siemens Desigo CC, Bosch BIS , and related systems to maintain safe, efficient, and uninterrupted building operations.

SafeKit for ATC

Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems are critical to aviation safety, enabling real‑time monitoring and control of aircraft movements on the ground and in the air through surveillance, guidance, and control applications.

SafeKit reinforces ATC system resilience by guaranteeing uninterrupted controller access to critical airside applications. It is used with ATC and airport solutions such as ADB SafeGate to support safe, continuous air traffic operations under all conditions.

SafeKit for OCC

Operations Control Centers (OCC) are at the heart of modern metro networks, centralizing supervision of train movements, power supply, signaling, passenger information, and incident management. In automated driverless metro lines, the OCC is the single point of control for operations.

SafeKit secures uninterrupted metro supervision by ensuring OCC applications remain available during failures. It supports Operations Control Centers for automated, driverless Paris metro lines , enabling continuous service and rapid incident response without reliance on onboard drivers.

Why an All-in-One SANless High Availability Product is Essential?

In the world of business continuity, many organizations mistakenly believe that having a backup or a data replication tool is the same as having High Availability (HA). In reality, these are only pieces of a much larger puzzle. To truly guarantee 100% uptime, you need an all-in-one solution that integrates every layer of the failover process.

Here is why a fragmented approach fails and why an integrated, all-in-one product like SafeKit —utilizing host-based replication at the file level —is required.

Is host-based replication alone sufficient for High Availability?

No. Data replication is simply the act of copying data from Server A to Server B. While critical, replication by itself does not provide availability. Without the other components of an HA stack, replication is just a “passive copy” that requires manual, time-consuming intervention to become useful:

If Server A crashes, data replication software will not automatically point your users to Server B.
It will not detect that the application has stopped.
It will not restart the services.

The Hidden Risks of Fragmented Solutions: Why Siloed HA Increases Failure

Many vendors require you to “bolt together” several different products to achieve host-based replication , failover , and load balancing. This fragmented architecture is a dangerous strategy for mission-critical systems:

Fragile Integration: When you use product A for replication and product B for clustering, you create a “house of cards.” Every OS update or security patch risks breaking the fragile communication link between these separate engines.
High Cognitive Load & Human Error: Managing multiple interfaces increases the risk of mistakes. During a high-pressure system failure, jumping between different GUIs or using different CLI syntaxes to diagnose a problem leads to confusion and extended downtime.
Vendor Finger-Pointing: If a failover fails, the replication vendor may blame the clustering tool, leaving you stuck in the middle with no clear path to resolution. An all-in-one solution provides a single point of accountability.
Complex Maintenance: Fragmented systems require specialized skills for each separate component, making the solution harder to maintain and significantly more expensive over time.

Beyond data, what specific components are required for a true SANless failover?

To automate recovery and eliminate downtime, an all-in-one product must manage several technical moving parts simultaneously:

Host-Based Replication: real-time, synchronous replication of critical application data between servers without relying on shared storage (SAN). This ensures zero data loss (RPO=0) and eliminates expensive hardware dependencies.
Virtual IP Address (VIP): This provides a single entry point for users. When a failure occurs, the software moves the VIP from the failed node to the healthy one, so users don’t have to change their configuration.
Hardware and Software Error Detectors: The system must constantly “heartbeat” both the physical server and the specific software processes to identify a hang or a crash immediately.
Customizable Restart Scripts: Not every application starts the same way. An all-in-one tool allows for custom scripts to ensure complex services start in the correct order.
Automatic Failover: The intelligence to orchestrate the entire move from one server to another without human input.

Why must the failover mechanism be synchronized with host-based replication?

If your failover manager and your data replication are two different products, they may not be “in sync.”

The Danger: If a failover occurs but the replication hasn’t finished sending the latest bits, Server B will start the application with outdated or corrupted data.

An all-in-one SANless HA solution ensures that the failover mechanism is aware of the replication state. It will only allow the application to start on the backup node if the data is guaranteed to be up-to-date, preventing conflicting active nodes and data loss.

What happens when the failed server is repaired (failback)?

Often ignored in technical guides and poorly executed by traditional HA solutions, automatic failback remains the most critical requirement for true resilience. A true all-in-one product handles the “Return to Normal” as elegantly as the failure. When the failed server comes back online, it is behind in data. The HA software must:

Resynchronize data in the background from the active node to the recovered node.
Maintain Uptime: This resynchronization must happen without interrupting the application currently running on the active node.
Restore Redundancy: Once the data is mirrored again, the cluster automatically returns to a protected state, ready for the next event.

Block vs. File Level Replication: Why Transparency Matters

The technical method used for host-based replication significantly impacts how much you have to change your existing application setup.

The Challenge of Block-Level Replication: Most SANless solutions replicate at the disk/block level. This is not transparent for the application. It requires you to reconfigure the application entirely to move its data onto a specific, newly created “replicated disk” volume. This often involves complex migration and potential changes to application logic.
The SafeKit File-Level Advantage: SafeKit performs host-based replication at the file level , which is completely transparent for the application. You do not need to move data to a special disk; you simply configure SafeKit to replicate the existing application folders. These folders can even remain on the system disk , allowing you to protect an application exactly where it is already installed.

Choosing Your High Availability Strategy: VM HA vs. Application HA

SafeKit offers two primary approaches to ensure business continuity: Virtual Machine HA (VM HA) and Application HA. While both methods provide automatic failover capabilities, they differ significantly in their scope, data replication mechanisms, recovery speed, and platform compatibility. This comparison breaks down these differences to help identify the optimal strategy for specific IT environments, whether the focus is on broad virtualization support or granular, high-speed application recovery.

Feature Comparison: SafeKit VM HA vs. SafeKit Application HA Clustering

Comparison Feature	VM HA with SafeKit Hyper-V or KVM Module	Application HA with SafeKit Application Modules
Deployment Diagram
Failover Scope	SafeKit inside 2 hypervisors: replication and failover of the full VM.	SafeKit inside 2 virtual or physical machines: replication and failover at the application level.
Data Replicated	Replicates more data (Application + Operating System).	Replicates only application data, leading to smaller data volumes.
Recovery Process & Speed (RTO)	Reboot of VM on hypervisor 2 if hypervisor 1 crashes. Recovery time depends on the OS reboot. VM checker and failover mechanism.	Quick recovery time with restart of App on OS2 if server 1 crashes. Typically around 1 minute or less (low RTO). Application checker and software failover.
Installation	Application is installed once in a single VM.	Application is installed on two nodes.
Configuration	Generic solution for any application / OS running in the VM. • It does not require a technical understanding of the application installed within the VM. • It is the best solution if you do not know how the application works. • You only need to define the location of the VM files.	It requires a technical understanding of the application itself. • Which services need to be restarted. • The specific application folders that need real-time replication. • The configuration of a virtual IP address for failover.
Platform Compatibility	Works with Windows/Hyper-V and Linux/KVM but is not compatible with VMware.	Platform agnostic; works with physical or virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and any hypervisor, including VMware.
Ideal For	Ideal for managing complex environments with multiple applications across several VMs through a single HA policy.	Ideal for embedding high availability directly into a software solution, independent of the underlying hardware or hypervisor.

SafeKit High Availability Limitations

Why a replication of a few Tera-bytes?

Resynchronization time after a failure (step 3)

1 Gb/s network ≈ 3 Hours for 1 Tera-bytes.
10 Gb/s network ≈ 1 Hour for 1 Tera-bytes or less depending on disk write performances.

Alternative

For a large volume of data, use external shared storage.
More expensive, more complex.

Why a replication < 1,000,000 files?

Resynchronization time performance after a failure (step 3).
Time to check each file between both nodes.

Alternative

Put the many files to replicate in a virtual hard disk / virtual machine.
Only the files representing the virtual hard disk / virtual machine will be replicated and resynchronized in this case.

Why a failover ≤ 32 replicated VMs?

Each VM runs in an independent mirror module.
Maximum of 32 mirror modules running on the same cluster.

Alternative

Use an external shared storage and another VM clustering solution.
More expensive, more complex.

Why a LAN/VLAN network between remote sites?

Automatic failover of the virtual IP address with 2 nodes in the same subnet.
Good bandwidth for resynchronization (step 3) and good latency for synchronous replication (typically a round-trip of less than 2ms).