Marathon Extends Fault Tolerance To Remote Site Or Cloud With ARCserve

fault tolerant server replication disaster recovery

That solution, everRun MX Extend, allows servers to not only have automatic failover at the customer site, but also replicates the server environment and data across a WAN to provide remote recovery in case of a disaster at the customer's primary site, said Rob Ciampa, vice president of marketing for Littleton, Mass.-based Marathon.

everRun MX, which was released last month, provides full fault tolerance to applications that require 100 percent uptime, said Jim Welch, Marathon president and CEO. It combines 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.

ARCserve, a popular data protection storage software, provides disaster recovery over a WAN. "We wanted a best of breed offering," Ciampa said. "We looked around, and found CA and that its technology was easy to integrate into everRun MX."

everRun MX Extend provides system-level fault tolerance for customers without the budget or the expertise to handle server downtimes, Ciampa said. For customers who need that capability over a wider area, there are other synchronous replication technologies available, but they are expensive and do not necessarily include connection to a hot site. "With CA integration, we provide that capability," he said.

For customers without a remote site, everRun MX Extend also provides remote failover of the server environment with related storage and applications to a compute cloud, Ciampa said.

everRun MX software costs about $10,000 per pair of protected servers, while everRun MX Extends costs about $15,000, Ciampa said. "So we are able to hit a very attractive disaster recover price point while providing customers full protection," he said.