Marathon Unveils Low Cost Server Fault ToleranceMarathon Unveils Low Cost Server Fault Tolerance

Marathon Technologies announced Tuesday availability of its everRun MX software, which helps small to midsize businesses affordably ensure uptime for applications running on on-premises Windows servers.

Most of today's server hardware has multi-core CPUs, and many servers are configured for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Marathon claims that everRun MX is "the industry's first software-based fault tolerant solution for SMP and multi-core servers and applications." Fault tolerance, according to Marathon, eliminates risks associated with restarts of systems and of virtual machines and data recovery. The high-availability software vendor claims that, previously, fault-tolerance for Windows appliances was available only on a single processor, not multi-core; IT would have to default back to high-availability, use an expensive system or run the risk of downtime.

"Providing full fault tolerance, especially in software, for SMP, including multi-core architectures, is a very big deal," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "A lot of applications have gotten processor-hungry, they can exploit multiple cores and they're often mission-critical."

For small to midsize businesses, according to Jim Welch, president and chief executive officer, Marathon Technologies, uses for everRun MX include front-office applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server.

By running on two or more machines, everRun MX provides fault-tolerance, meaning that a problem on one box will not stop or interrupt an application. According to Marathon, this eliminates IT risks associated with system/VM restarts and data recovery. "All the complexity of management is hidden," said Welch. "We make the two systems look like one, for example, for software installs and patches... we keep the systems in synch, so it can failover seamlessly, users don't have to re-login."

"IT folks don't like disaster recovery," said Jim Welch, president and chief executive officer, Marathon Technologies. "It's expensive when you need to use it. EverRun MX lets them bring local availability." Marathon notes that, "Recent research by IDC shows revenue loss per hour for midsize companies ranges from $60,000 to $1 million, depending on industry. Productivity loss adds another $4,000 to $22,000 per hour...Coleman-Parkes Research also analyzed downtime for organizations over fifty people and found that the average loss per firm is approximately $356,000 per year, and this does not include brand impact or long-term efficiency effects."

"Rather than think about recovering, this is about preventing problems," said ESG's Whitehouse. "Marathon maintains lockstep with a copy, and ensures that the system will not go down. It's not just the investment cost, but also the ongoing operational cost, and costs and trade-offs if there's an event. With prevention, you get to avoid all the associated costs of having downtime -- no need for 'fire drill' practice, no dissatisfaction, no recovery time. That can be huge. I am not aware of any other solution that offers this value based on the investment in the technology, or in terms of amount of IT time required and other associated times from downtime events."

EverRun MX features include full SMP/multi-core fault tolerance and redundant operation across servers, no requirements for application level customization or complex scripting, full automation and it runs on commodity servers. According to Welch, everRun MX works with any 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows currently supported by Microsoft, and any application that runs under them. According to Welch, virtualization is part of everRun MX, "so you can be running dozens of applications." Currently, Marathon supports everRun MX only on Intel systems.

Systems being protected with everRun MX for fault-tolerance can be located next to each other, on different floors, even in different buildings. "It depends on bandwidth and cost," said Welch. "We can synchronously keep systems together up to about 100 miles away."

An everRun MX complete configuration starts under $10,000 with licenses for two systems. Paired systems allow the load be split and shared; everRun MX can also be used to provide N+1 protection (for more than three active servers).