Marathon Technologies this week unveiled fault tolerant software for high availability of applications on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multicore servers in Windows environments.

The latest version of Marathon’s everRun family, everRun MX, is targeted at small- to medium-sized IT operations as well healthcare, manufacturing and remote offices. everRun MX synchronizes between disk systems, and can work with storage area networks (SANs) or direct-attached storage (DAS). Marathon’s first generation everRun 2G was introduced about two years ago and it supported a single processor. This generation of everRun MX supports two, four or eight physical processors.

The everRun MX software is composed of three parts. The Component Manager allows the application to look at the hardware across all platforms as a single instance. It controls all the I/O operations to the disk, network and memory and helps maintain connections for data and transactional integrity. The Workload Manager supports multiple workloads so that applications can be stacked onto a single server pair, and the Availability Manager helps the traffic between the two servers stay in sync. “All of our key intellectual property is inside the Availability Manager,” Marathon CEO Jim Welch said. “It’s where all the hard work is done. This is where all the true fault tolerance occurs.”

Marathon vice president of marketing Rob Ciampa said everRun MX is more about preventing downtime than enablingapplication recovery.

“It’s much better never to go down than to deal with the implications of an outage,” he said.

Laura DiDio, principal analyst at ITIC, described this launch as a reboot of the company. Marathon secured $13.5 million in venture funding over the past year, and she said most of the vendor’s employees have joined in that period.

“This is getting back on track with new staff and new direction,” DiDio said. “They have expanded their focus. They are heading more into applications, virtualization and fault tolerance.”

She said the most interesting thing about everRun MX is that is that it enables software-based fault tolerant without requiring a specialized hardware solution. “In the past, if you wanted fault tolerance, you needed specialized fault tolerance hardware,” DiDio said. “Most people couldn’t afford it.”

Data Protection, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, everRun MX, WAN Optimization

Marathon Technologies has been working on creating a fault tolerant environment based upon standard, off-the-shelf systems for quite some time. everRun MX is the newest in a long line of products designed to bring the benefits of fault tolerant computing to more organizations by using industry standard servers. What’s new this time is that the product does its magic using symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)  as well as multi-core systems. Applications running in a well-implemented environment should continue to run even though some components have failed.

Here’s what Marathon has to say about this new release

Key attributes of everRun MX

• World class application availability through downtime prevention instead of recovery.
• Full SMP/multi-core fault tolerant and redundant operation across servers eliminates risks associated with system/VM restarts and data recovery.
• No hardware lock-in. Runs on commodity servers, not specialized equipment. It immediately leverages hardware innovations while providing server selection freedom.
• Natively scales and works with all applications, regardless of computing demands.
• Requires no application level customization or complex scripting routinely found in conventional availability offerings.
• Fully automated and self-healing. everRun MX’s prevention response requires no operator intervention, a trademark Marathon capability ideal for environments where staffing or access is constrained.

Snapshot analysis

As Professor Marcello Truzzi once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Another often used quote is “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” which is attributed to William Camden. Claiming the ability to create a never-fail environment based upon standard off-the-shelf hardware is something that most would say is an extraordinary claim.  After all, systems, memory, storage, networks and all other components of a computing solution fail at one time or another.

Hardware oriented fault tolerant systems suppliers, such as Stratus, would tell you that installing a machine that has built-in redundancy and hardware failover mechanisms would be less costly than building out an environment using multiple independent computing systems.  After all, they would say, a single copy of the operating system, data management tools, application frameworks and applications themselves would be needed. That alone would reduce the software and administrative costs of a solution.

Marathon, on the other hand, believes that a properly designed approach that is based upon common, everyday systems can approach the availability and reliability of those purpose-built systems. I suspect, however, that they can’t approach the failover speed seen when using those systems.

When asked for proof, Marathon would point out that their technology is in day-to-day use in 30 countries by thousands of organizations. Is that enough proof?

Well, it certainly seems convincing.  Has your organization used one of Marathon Technologies’ everRun products? Has it lived up to their promises?

If your organization has a need for this type of solution, it would be worth taking the time to see a demonstration of this technology.

everrun, everRun MX, virtualization

Source: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/services/disaster-prevention-and-recovery.aspx

disaster recovery, double take, high availability, Neverfail, replication, wansync

Windows IT Pro magazine and SQL Server Magazine announced the winners of their Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards yesterday evening. Jeff Lewis, the Group Publisher of the Windows IT Group, presented the awards at a ceremony at Universal Studios in Orlando. Out of over 223 product nominations that were received for the Best of Tech Ed Awards, editors chose 29 finalists in nine categories.

* * * Read this article online at WINDOWSITPRO.COM

Winners were chosen based on innovation, competitive advantage, and value to customers.

In the Messaging category, the winner is Azaleos OneServer Virtual Edition. Our judges liked the features of this innovative virtual appliance, ranging from its polished interface to its wealth of management and analysis options.

The winner in the Business Intelligence category is SoftArtisans OfficeWriter. OfficeWriter can connect to SQL Server, Analysis Services, and other databases and deliver fully functional Microsoft Excel and Word documents over the Web.

In the SharePoint category, the winner is the AvePoint DocAve Software Platform. SharePoint use is exploding, and the DocAve Software Platform provides an integrated environment for SharePoint management, disaster recovery, and real-time backup.

In the Hardware, Networking, and Storage category, the winner is Strangeloop WS1000. The WS 1000 can increase the performance of Web services by an order of magnitude. Its advanced caching technologies enable plug-and-play performance optimization without requiring any changes to the Web services application code.

In the Database Administration category, the winner is SQL diagnostic manager. SQL diagnostic manager provides the ability to monitor SQL Server performance as well as diagnose and analyze performance problems.

In the Productivity and Collaboration category, the winner is Colligo Contributor Pro. Giving users access to company information on the road is essential, and Colligo Contributor Pro allows users to access and edit Microsoft SharePoint content both online and offline.

In the Security category, the winner is Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange. ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange provides comprehensive e-mail security including anti-virus, anti-spyware and zero-day virus protection.

In the Virtualization category, the winner is VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. Virtualization is taking the IT world by storm, and VMware has been driving that change more than anyone.

In the Systems Management and Operations category, the winner is Athena by Odyssey Software. Athena is a management solution for Windows-based mobile devices. The product seamlessly integrates into the Microsoft System Center management interface to provide remote tools, extended asset reporting, and provisioning for mobile devices in the enterprise.

The Breakthrough Product award winner is Quest Software’s PowerGUI, a scripting and command shell platform that enhances ease of use of Windows PowerShell.

This year’s Attendees’ Pick award winner is Syntergy Replicator for SharePoint.

avepoint, MOSS, replication, replicator, sharepoint, syntergy

AUSTIN, Texas – Jan. 26, 2010 – Neverfail®, a leading global software company specializing in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today debuted the Neverfail Continuous Availability Director. Part of the Neverfail suite, the Continuous Availability Director is a centralized management console for Neverfail implementations, which enables a business-centric view of high availability and disaster recovery across systems, processes and services that are dependent upon multiple applications. Eliminating down time for end-users and business-critical systems requires full protection and management across all key application servers. However, traditional solutions to manage and protect availability of these systems have been complex and time consuming because each application server must be managed and protected independently. Neverfail Continuous Availability Director solves this problem by providing a single point of management and control for all business-critical systems. “The primary focus when architecting for continuous availability should be the user experience,” said Donna Scott, VP at Gartner. “That experience will depend on the availability of multiple IT services and applications supporting business processes so it’s important that any continuous availability and disaster recovery architecture protects and assures service levels across multiple IT services.” Through centralized monitoring, management and configuration for all business-critical systems and underlying application servers, Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides a truly business-centric view. This is done through a user interface that, for the first time, lets organizations visualize availability at the group level. Now they can view availability by business process (manufacturing, quality assurance), business system (SharePoint, mobile messaging), business service (accounting, payroll processing) or organization structure (London office, Media division, Finance Dept.). “Business systems and applications cannot exist in vacuums,” said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail. “By providing a centralized view of each piece in the continuous availability puzzle, Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides the unifying element so end-users never lose access to the critical applications required to do their jobs.” Neverfail Continuous Availability Director sits on top of Neverfail’s Application-Aware Management Framework (AMF), which controls how continuous availability is optimized for different applications. The Continuous Availability Director’s centralized management console adds a layer of business-level insight into application availability, including: ? A Business-Centric view of business systems, underlying application servers and their interdependencies ? Centralized Global Health status (alerts, alarms, etc.) ? Detailed graphical representation of switchover, failover status progress ? Simplified roll-up status of rules and events through collapsible display options (for memory, disk, processor, etc.) ? Simplified visualization and configuration of alerts Availability Neverfail Continuous Availability Director is available now as part of the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite. About Neverfail Neverfail is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail’s software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail’s mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime and enables the more productive use of IT resources. Neverfail is a member of the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Program, the Microsoft US Managed ISV Alliance Partner Program and is a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.

Disaster Recovery Software, high availability, Neverfail

High Availability has changed the way we now do business. But more than that it has changed the way users expect our business to run. This has made it more important than ever to keep our applications highly available.

In a recent paper I wrote titled “Making High Availability Pay for Itself” I wrote about how you can achieve these goals without emptying your pockets.

One of the products I looked at was from a company called Marathon Technologies. Marathon has been working in the areas of Disaster Recovery, Fault Tolerance and High Availability for a while now.

Their latest product everRun 2G, provides a flexible and cost effective way to implement high availability.
Some of the things I found that impressed me were a single solution for all your Windows platforms. There is no need to buy separate product versions for Windows 2003 or 2008, for 32 or 64bit platforms; everRun 2G will work across all of them.

This newest HA solution from Marathon not only provides a single platform solution for HA it also has a ton of great features like:
• The ability to use local storage, shared storage or a SAN
• Create single or multiple workloads

And most importantly everRun 2G offers automation…Automate the setup and configuration using setup wizards and a very functional browser interface. Automate fault detection and management of your HA solution with everRun’s embedded policy management. One of the best features I found was the ability to choose the level of protection for each application.

I have found that many HA solutions tend to be all or nothing and we are trying to fit our applications into our HA solution rather than our solution fitting our needs. This kind of customization was a real winner for me. I also liked the SplitSite feature which allows you to create a continuous availability in a different geographic location from your main data site.

everRun 2G is easy to setup, simple to manage and provides the kind of flexibility that really makes high availability pay for itself. Check out the webinar demo, schedule a live demo or download a trial at Marathon Technologies everRun 2G product site.

everrun, marathon, software, technologies, virtualization