LITTLETON, MA — May 25, 2011 — Marathon Technologies, the leading provider and innovator of application availability solutions, today announced the general release of everRun MX 6.1, the latest generation of its flagship product line. everRun MX, the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core servers and applications, is used worldwide by organizations that require absolutely no unplanned downtime. Since its introduction last year, everRun MX has been widely adopted in process automation, distribution, manufacturing, building security, media, gaming, transportation, and general IT.

“Marathon’s everRun MX changed the worldwide market for always-on computing by delivering unparalleled application uptime for any organization and all Windows-based applications. There’s just nothing better,” said Gerard Wubben, CEO at Raxco Software, a Marathon partner. “Now the new release of everRun MX 6.1 redefines the application availability equation yet again with improvements to performance, scalability, and manageability. As a leading IT provider in Europe, we view everRun MX as a critical and necessary part of any business that requires 24×7 operations.”

New capabilities of everRun MX 6.1 include:

• Increased scalability and support for additional protected virtual machines to fully capitalize on continual advances in server technology
• Expanded server coverage and compatibility to ensure broader freedom of hardware choice and deployment scenarios to worldwide partners and customers
• New platform-specific management applications including Dell OpenManage, Fujitsu ServerView, and HP Insight Manager to facilitate easy and seamless integration into nearly any operating environment
• Greater overall performance for networking, disk I/O, and shared storage to simultaneously deliver maximum application performance with total downtime prevention
• Additional operating system and server pack support to enable protection of all applications regardless of the underlying Windows platform

everRun MX combines the physical resources of two standard Windows servers into a single operating environment.  It functions with complete redundancy to ensure comprehensive and fully-automated fault tolerance and high availability for hardware, storage, applications, and networks. This provides continuous availability for applications that simply cannot have any downtime or lose operations or transactional data.

“everRun MX 6.1 reinforces Marathon’s continual track record of innovation in fault tolerance and demanding availability markets,” said Jerry Melnick, CTO of Marathon Technologies. “Our R&D efforts, as exemplified by this release, further expand the breadth and depth of world-class application availability while providing it in a future-proof architecture. We made significant upgrades across many dimensions of everRun MX, but also made it easier than ever to deploy in any Windows environment, whether on the factory floor, in the small business office, or in the enterprise data center.”

About Marathon Technologies
Marathon keeps applications running for over 3,000 companies in more than 30 countries. From email to electronic records, factory floors to trading floors, 911 call centers to emergency rooms, our everRun® application availability software proactively prevents application downtime. As experts in application availability, we’ve applied what we’ve learned from working with the world’s leading companies and application providers to deliver innovative software and services that prevent downtime, eliminate data loss, and reduce operational costs. For more information on ensuring non-stop business operations, please visit us at www.marathontechnologies.com.

disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, fault tolerance, high availability, marathon, virtualization

Providence Solutions is participating in these upcoming events. Be sure to join us and understand more about our products. We will also be conducting lucky draw for $100 robinsons vouchers at these events!

ICT Forum 2011 Singapore
24th February 2011,
Time : 9am to 5pm
Venue : Raffles Convention Centre
Padang/Collyer Room Level 4, Raffles City Convention Centre 80 Bras Basah Road Singapore 189560
Booth : Q

Register Now

Sharepoint Conference Australia
Date: 8th & 9th March 2011 Time: 8.30am to 6pm (Day1) 8.30am to 5pm (Day 2)
Venue : Hilton Sydney, Australia 488 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000

Register Now

Global Security Asia 2011
Date: 15th to 17th March 2011,
Time : 10am to 5pm
Venue : Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Level 1 – Halls A & B, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore Booth : 505

Register Now

Data Protection, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, Disaster Recovery Software, everrun, fault tolerance, high availability, replicator, SharePoint Replication, software, virtualization, Virtualization backup, WAN Optimization

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