One of the basic concepts of server virtualization [1] is the ability to abstract servers from the underlying hardware, preventing vendor lock-in  and giving consumers the ability to mix and match commodity hardware in their environments.  Marathon Technologies has taken that a step further by providing consumers with a software-based fault-tolerant solution that runs on commodity servers, not specialized equipment, thereby also preventing hardware vendor lock-in.

Marathon’s everRun MX is designed to help small to mid-size organizations affordably ensure uptime for applications running on industry-standard Windows servers.  With this latest version Marathon is able to take advantage of today’s modern server hardware, which has multi-core CPUs and is usually configured for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).

Customer demand for always-on environments has outpaced the ability of companies to protect themselves against a system fault, according to Marathon.  As a result, high availability (HA) is no longer “good enough.”  Customers want more than the ability to quickly recover from a system failure.  They want fault tolerance.

everRun MX provides fault tolerance to applications that require 100 percent uptime.  It does so by combining two standard Windows servers into a single operating environment with complete redundancy of all underlying hardware and data.  everRun MX then presents these redundant servers as a single operating environment to keep applications running in the event of component or system failures.  It operates in lockstep, ensuring redundancy of the hardware, data, and networks, to provide automated fault management.  Marathon says this ensures true continuous availability for applications that simply cannot have any downtime, or lose “in-flight” transactions.

Marathon claims everRun MX is the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing and multi-core servers and applications.  The company also says everRun MX removes the price/performance barrier to continuous uptime, which not only eliminates technology tradeoffs but also makes fault tolerance more obtainable by any organization, regardless of its size.

Software fault tolerance itself is not new in the virtualization [5] community.  Virtualization giant VMware [6] also provides a software FT solution for its own platform.  But both VMware and Marathon have had to settle on protecting only those virtual machines that were configured with a single virtual CPU.  Until now, keeping two virtual CPUs in lockstep has proven to be quite the challenge.

Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst with the Taneja Group, believes Marathon is out ahead of VMware fault-tolerance with its everRun MX software.  “[Fault-tolerance] has always been a niche market, because you either needed very expensive fault-tolerant hardware or complex fault-tolerant software that wasn’t actually much cheaper.  Marathon is cheaper than hardware and legacy software fault-tolerance solutions, and they support SMP and multi-core servers and, critically, the apps that require them,” Bartoletti added.

By only supporting fault tolerance on a single virtual CPU VM, virtualization expansion in the production environment has halted or at least slowed down for many organizations.  One of the reasons many IT shops have hit the VM Stall [7] mark of around 30 percent is because they haven’t been able to provide that high degree of fault tolerance to mission-critical applications.  While virtualization platforms have supported multi-core and SMP virtual machines for some time, they have not been able to provide SMP fault tolerance and therefore could not guarantee uptime for these business-critical applications.

Based on many conversations with his own clients, Bartoletti agrees. “Now that the easy stuff is mostly virtualized, the hard stuff isn’t limited by consolidation requirements but by availability.  Those mission-critical analytics servers won’t get virtualized without a high degree of fault tolerance, and more and more they are leveraging multi-core servers,” he said.

Bartoletti also believes Marathon’s solution can help change what he calls the “FT 90/10 rule,” where 90 percent of a fault-tolerance budget is spent protecting only 10 percent of the workloads.  If fault tolerance is made more affordable and available for multi-core servers, he believes they can help push that number to 80/20 or perhaps even to 70/30.

According to Marathon, everRun MX only works with Intel systems today.  However, the company is working on a similar product that will work for AMD processors.  everRun MX can operate with any 32- or 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows and any application that runs on them, but the latest release is limited to the Citrix XenServer virtual appliance.  The company is working on Linux and VMware compatibility down the road.

A complete everRun MX configuration starts at under $10,000 with licenses for two systems that can be paired together with any configuration (core/sockets/memory) and includes one year of support and maintenance.  For more uptime guarantee, everRun MX can also provide N+1 protection when three or more active servers are used.

This article, “Marathon beats VMware to the SMP fault-tolerance [8] punch [8],” was originally published at InfoWorld.com [9]. Follow the latest developments in virtualization [10] and cloud computing [11] at InfoWorld.com.

everRun MX, fault tolerance, high availability, vmware

One of the pillars of virtualization is the ability to abstract servers from hardware to provide additional availability. Of course, infrastructure demands continue to increase and we seek to deliver high availability or even fault tolerance beyond the basic virtual machine. A number of solutions are available for virtual workloads.

The fault-tolerant space has three mainstream players: the VMware Fault Tolerance virtual machine feature with vSphere, Neverfail (which has an OEM relationship for VMware’s vCenter Server Heartbeat feature) and Marathon Technologies. Neverfail aligns with VMware, and Marathon aligns with Citrix.

Since the middle of the last decade, Marathon Technologies has offered solutions from HA to FT for Windows workloads before virtualized servers were mainstream in the datacenter. Back when I worked in the supply chain software industry, I used the everRun HA solution to replace fault-tolerant hardware solutions such as the NEC Express5800/ft or Stratus ftServer. Even back then, Marathon allowed customers to utilize commodity hardware for these HA and FT solutions.

Marathon recently released everRun MX, which provides a flexible offering to deliver FT workloads on commodity hardware. everRun MX can work for those who want to deploy a robust solution for a few workloads without a huge investment. everRun MX can use direct-attached storage or shared storage, making it price competitive if a traditional SAN is not involved. I’ve always thought it is very tough to provide a robust, highly available virtualized environment from small footprints such as a remote office.

With everRun MX, a base configuration starts at $10,000 and allows administrators to run a pair of servers of any configuration (core/sockets/memory) and includes one year of support and maintenance. The servers must have Intel processors. You can run everRun MX on dissimilar hardware, but they should be comparable. everRun MX uses the term Metal Pool, which would loosely equate to a cluster of virtual machines running with FT capabilities.

Figure 1. everRun MX allows a collection of virtual machines to function in a fault tolerant mode on commodity hardware. (Click image to view larger version.)

You might be asking: How well would this type of configuration be received within the greater software landscape? As virtualization customers, we go through this battle with new software titles to see if the software vendor supports their product being run on a virtual machine. For an architecture like this, it’s not as widely embraced as is a VMware virtual machine as a supported platform. But Marathon does offer 24×7 worldwide support in addition to an extensive partner ecosystem. I haven’t used Marathon products in a while, but everRun MX seems to bring more to the table for the customer seeking value and features.

citrix, everRun MX, ftserver, high availability, marathon, xenserver

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

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