New York, NY—August 5, 2010—Syntergy today announced it has successfully deployed and configured thelargest worldwide, distributed SharePoint 2010 environment using Syntergy Replicator 4.0. This large scaleperformance and scalability benchmark is part of the enterprise testing effort underway for the major new releaseof Syntergy Replicator, Syntergy’s flagship enterprise data replication solution for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and2010.Using the latest Microsoft hardware virtualization technologies at the Microsoft Technology Center in New YorkCity, the Syntergy Massive Scalability Team was able to replicate content to more than 60 SharePoint 2010 serverfarms. This massive SharePoint environment was able to replicate hundreds of thousands of documents andhundreds of gigabytes of data over the course of a several hours.Syntergy Replicator is the only enterprise scale solution for real-time, event-based replication of SharePointcontent that supports multi-engine environments. Replicator enables content to flow easily and efficiently fromthe sources of content creation to the consumers in an efficient, real-time manner. Syntergy Replicator 4.0 buildsupon this history with additional configuration options for optimizing overall performance, resource utilization andautomatic configuration in multi-hop environments.“Many of our corporate, public sector and military customers are also Microsoft SharePoint customers. Theydemand the most of their SharePoint solutions and, like the large-scale deployment we created in the MicrosoftTechnology Center, they use Replicator for securely sharing information around the world. We want to ensure thatReplicator 4.0 will not only support their efforts, but exceeds their expectations,” said David Seaman, VPSharePoint Technologies, Syntergy. “This massive scalability benchmark demonstrates the power and efficiency ofReplicator 4.0.”Syntergy Replicator 4.0 is scheduled to be released in September 2010. For more information, please visitwww.syntergy.com or email info@syntergy.com.About SyntergyFounded in 1997, Syntergy works to solve the needs of globally distributed enterprise–sized businesses.Specializing in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, Syntergy helps global organizations overcome thechallenges they face in sharing information around the world. Syntergy’s flagship product, Syntergy Replicator, is aweb-based platform used to synchronize and manage business intelligence in real-time across a wide areaSharePoint server environment. Replicator ensures uninterrupted access to SharePoint content, enhancingemployee productivity and efficiency, and improving branch office performance globally. Syntergy is a MicrosoftGold Certified partner. www.syntergy.com

MOSS, sharepoint, SharePoint Replication

October 5, 2010 – Marathon Technologies released a software-only solution today that provides fault tolerance and high availability for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core CPU servers. Dubbed everRun MX, the software enables users to eliminate server, application and I/O downtime in Windows environments without purchasing specialized fault-tolerant hardware.

Based on Marathon’s ComputeThru technology, everRun MX is designed to reduce the need for system/VM restarts and data recovery/restore (although the company does recommend implementing standard backup and recovery procedures.) The software can be implemented with direct-attached storage (DAS), eliminating the need to deploy a SAN for high availability purposes (although everRun MX can also be used in conjunction with a SAN).

“A lot of people approach high availability from a storage perspective, and deploy a SAN for fault tolerance,” says Rob Ciampa, vice president of marketing at Marathon, “but a SAN is expensive and doesn’t provide full fault tolerance. everRun MX can eliminate the need for a SAN.”

everRun MX protects against all types of failure, including server (physical and virtual), software, I/O and storage. The software includes three key modules:

–A Component Management element interfaces with network and storage I/O on protected servers

–Availability Manager maintains synchronization between server, network and storage resources

– Workload Manager supports multiple workloads and VMs, as well as application consolidation

Storage-specific features of the software include safeguards to protect storage and data against corruption during mirror copies, and the ability to add disks with pre-existing data to a protected virtual machine (VM).

Pricing for everRun MX starts at $10,000. The software does not require application-level customization or scripting.

Market researcher IDC estimates that revenue loss per hour for midsize companies ranges from $60,000 to $1 million, and that end-user productivity loss adds another $4,000 to $22,000 per hour.

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Software, everrun, everRun MX, virtualization

Marathon Technologies, a provider of network availability solutions, has announced the release of everRun MX, which it characterizes as the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core servers and applications. Marathon says that with everRun MX, any organization can turn standard servers into hardened, fault tolerant platforms that prevent application downtime and eliminate data loss, critical requirements for systems that must operate without interruption.

“Marathon’s everRun MX solves one of the most technically challenging problems in computing: scalable fault-tolerance across multi-core server architectures,” said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix, a Marathon business partner. “The implications for application availability are profound: every Windows-based application can be emancipated from downtime.”

Jim Welch, Marathon’s president and chief executive officer, says that this new platform is cost effective enough for even smaller users. He explains, “everRun MX is a major technological achievement that shatters the price/performance barrier that prevents organizations from truly being always on. We call this application availability – and we’re taking it mainstream. For years, too many organizations have settled for a complex patchwork of recovery-oriented solutions. everRun MX, offering complete application availability, blows that all away with a unified, prevention-based approach. We’re removing the complexity, risk, and economic constraints so no organization – large, small, local or remote – will have to settle for less.”

Key attributes of everRun MX include:

• 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. It 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, ideal for environments where staffing or access is constrained.

“Marathon’s everRun software was the only solution that had exactly what I needed right out of the box, including fault tolerant support for multi-processors, easy snapshot capabilities, and the freedom to choose the hardware that best fit my applications and environment,” said Mike Rische, senior electrical project engineer, PPG Industries. “In addition, the automated failover and synching features are essential for my manufacturing environment, staffed mostly by non-IT employees, where manual failover solutions are not practical.”

www.marathontechnologies.com

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Software, everrun, virtualization

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, everRun MX, high availability, virtualization

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

Recent studies have shown that the average worker checks email once every 15 minutes, with some users checking email as often as 40 times per hour. In addition, growing use of personal mobile devices means that employees have become literally attached to their email at all times, with some checking their device as soon as each email arrives. Now that email has evolved into a critical business communications tool, employees have come to expect access to their email 24×7, with very little tolerance for downtime.

Meeting the “always on” expectations of employees creates challenges for the IT administrator. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are increasingly stringent and demanding as users require non-stop access to email and other collaborative features of Microsoft Exchange. Availability of Exchange is paramount, as well as protecting the integrity of your Exchange data. In order to maintain Exchange availability, every component of the Exchange infrastructure needs to be considered. You can protect your mailbox server to the highest degree, but if your DNS server fails, the Exchange server may not be accessible.

To help your company protect its Exchange environment, Marathon has developed a series of steps for achieving optimal Exchange availability. The tips are designed to help identify what availability levels should be designated in order to achieve Exchange SLA commitments with fewer resources and lower costs.

Define Availability Objectives
Creating availability objectives is an important first step in formulating Exchange protection strategies. This is typically done by establishing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), the time it takes for an application to be running again, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the point in time to which the IT professional can recover data in case of a failure, for your Exchange environment.

RTO and RPO baselines establish the SLAs you commit to for the overall company, business units, or specific internal groups. You may even have different Exchange SLAs for different users within your company. For example, you may have an executive group that requires 24×7 email access, while the rest of the company can withstand Exchange downtime of up to one hour. In addition, consideration should be given to what level of protection is needed for the other components of your Exchange infrastructure, such as Active Directory and DNS servers.

Understanding the Levels of Availability
There are multiple levels of availability to consider for different applications and their support infrastructures, starting with basic failover and recovery, moving up to high availability, and all the way to continuous availability for extremely transaction-sensitive applications.

1. Level 1 – The Recovery level is for those applications for which recovery time (RTO) of a day or more is often acceptable. Some downtime is acceptable, and even significant downtime won’t have a detrimental effect on the business. Assurances that recovery will happen is not a requirement.
2. The High Availability level is the home of the majority of applications that run the business, such as email, CRM, financial systems, and databases. These are systems with high downtime costs, and therefore short RTO requirements. These applications require assurances that they will not be down for extended periods should failures occur.

3. The highest level of availability is Continuous Availability in which even brief moments of downtime or a single lost transaction can be extremely detrimental and/or costly to the client or business.

As you establish availability objectives for different groups of Exchange users, you need to consider the protection requirements for your entire Exchange infrastructure, beyond just the mailbox server. You will need to protect all of the components of the Exchange environment, in addition to the different workloads deployed on the mailbox server. Also, don’t rule out that the way you use Exchange today may not change in the future. You may use Exchange today for general correspondence, but within the next year you may plan to use email to process orders. This adds to the need to have multiple levels of availability to assign to the components of the Exchange infrastructure and Exchange user groups. Additionally you’ll need flexibility to change those levels as your business changes.

Assigning Levels of Availability to Exchange Environments
A meaningful exercise to undertake is to apply various levels of protection to your Exchange infrastructure based on your SLA commitments. First look at the users and their requirements for Exchange access. Do you have a single SLA in place for all users, or do you have multiple user groups with different SLAs? If you have a single SLA in place company-wide, you can deploy those users in workloads based on email usage and assign them a single level of protection. However if you have different SLAs for different business groups, you can divide those into multiple workgroups on the mailbox server based on their SLA requirements.

For example, if you have an executive group that needs a 24×7 uptime, then you should consolidate those executives in a dedicated Exchange workload and assign a level of protection that will provide continuous availability. Sales people can often fall into this category as well, requiring non-stop access to email and Exchange collaboration features. Other employees may have less stringent SLAs in place and would require a lower level of protection.

It is also important to keep the components of Exchange, including the DHCP server, DNS server and Active Directory server, up and running. If one or more of these components goes down, requiring the IT administrator to manually intervene could cause excessive downtime for Exchange and exceed your SLAs. Automatic recovery from failures enables you to keep the Exchange environment operating to meet your SLA commitments. Assigning a level of protection to the supporting systems, including  the DNS, DHCP, and Active Directory servers, equivalent to that necessary to meet your Exchange SLAs is as important as protecting the actual Exchange servers. Any single point of failure could bring down a well protected Exchange server.

For remote employees and “road warriors”, your company may also have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and/or Client Access Server (CAS) implementation, to serve as a secondary or backup method for remote email access. The BES and CAS implementations should be protected to the level you require based on your remote email access strategy and user SLAs.

Establishing RTO and RPO for SLA commitments, determining the right level of availability protection to meet these commitments, and protecting all components necessary to support an Exchange environment will help create n robust and reliable messaging system.

availability, data, software, virtualization