Marathon Enhances Server Fault Tolerance With New everRun MX

Marathon Technologies this week released everRun MX, a new version of its software that turns industry-standard software into fault tolerant solutions.

everRun MX provides full fault tolerance to applications that require 100 percent uptime, said Jim Welch, president and CEO of the Littleton, Mass.-based vendor.

It combines the two standard Windows servers into a single operating environment which provides complete redundancy of all underlying hardware and data. To applications, the two servers are presented as a single operating environment which can keep the applications running should a component or system fail.

Fault tolerance is not the same as high availability, said Rob Ciampa, vice president of marketing and product management for Marathon.

"Our approach has been to prevent downtime, and not focus on recovery," Ciampa said. "This becomes a challenge as the number of processor cores in a server continues to rise."

Next: Why Fault Tolerant Systems?

Customer demands for always-on Windows applications have outpaced the ability of companies to protect themselves against a system fault, Welch said.

As a result, high availability, which is the ability to recover quickly from a system failure, is no longer good enough for such customers, he said.

"Application availability today is all about recovery," he said. "For us, the fundamental approach shifts from recovery to always-on availability."

New to everRun MX is support for fault tolerant protection of symmetric multiprocessor and multi-core workloads, Welch said.

It also now includes the ability to take a point in time backup of a protected workloads. everRun MX also has integrated SNMP alerts to automate the workload level monitoring and alerting process. Multiple everRun MX pools can be managed from a single console.

Next: everRun MX For The Channel

Marathon is a 100-percent channel-focused vendor, Welch said.

"Our channel is central to our success," he said. "Our offering has a lot of pull-through for hardware and services for our partners. So if a solution provider does an Exchange upgrade, they can offer customers new hardware and services to make it fault tolerant."

everRun MX is shipping starting this week, with a starting price of just under $10,000, which includes all the licenses necessary to work with two physical servers.