Microsoft Partners With Marathon TechnologiesMicrosoft Partners With Marathon Technologies

Microsoft still struggles to make Windows 2000 an always-on operating system. To help, the mighty software vendor next week will become an original equipment manufacturing partner of Marathon Technologies Corp.

Marathon is one of a few low-cost, high-availability system vendors available to customers. When customers sign on for Marathon's Assured Availability system, they get a hardware/software/interconnect product that works with two standard Wintel servers. Information is always available to both servers, thanks to Assured Availability, so if one server goes down, the other server takes over the workload. Customers don't have to worry about any complicated software programming.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will show off the Marathon product in customer demonstrations and make it part of its labs, and the two vendors will market Assured Availability together.