Marthon teams up with Microsoft

While at Citrix's mega analyst event a while back, I saw a fantastic demonstration of both HA and fault tolerant configurations using Marathon Technologies' everRun combined with Citrix's XenServer. Well, the folks at Marathon are doing it again, this time with Microsoft and Hyper-V.  What Marathon has accomplished is shear industrial sorcery.

Here's what they had to say about the partnership

Microsoft Corp. and Marathon Technologies Corporation today announced a development and marketing agreement designed to address the fault tolerant and high availability computing needs for business customers running Windows Server-based applications in enterprise information technology departments and data centers. The collaboration is focused in three areas:

• Provide customers who deploy Windows Server 2008 and Marathon everRun software a seamless path to extend high availability protection to their critical applications.
• Provide Windows Server and Marathon everRun customers with the ability to select the appropriate level of availability, from failover clustering all the way up to system fault tolerance, for each application.
• Allow customers deploying a future version of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization technology, to use Marathon everRun for a fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure.

Snapshot analysis

One of the things holding some organizations back in the move towards deploying virtual servers has been concerns about availability and reliability of the workloads that have been consolidated on a single industry standard server.  This "put all your eggs in one basket" approach could certainly raise some concerns to those needing very highly available or fault tolerant solutions.

In the past, the choices have been to purchase someone's orchestration/automation solution, purchase expensive fault tolerant hardware or accept lower levels of uptime and use some other solution.  Marathon plus either Microsoft or Citrix is a different, more cost effective, way to achieve the same thing.

I was impressed with how simple this software is to install and manage. Even an analyst could do it. Furthermore, Marathon is going to plug their management software into Microsoft's. IT administrators who are already trained in Microsoft's tools will find it easy to manage HA or totally fault tolerant configurations.

If your organization needs this level of availability, but doesn't want to pay for fault tolerant hardware, this might be the solution for you.