Marathon Technologies and Microsoft dance together
Marathon Technologies has been on my radar screen for quite a long time. Early in the 1990s, the company developed an approach allowing paired Windows systems to provide an environment that was never seen to fail (see earlier posts on the company here Marathon Technologies launches everRun CDP and Marathon Technologies launches everRun VM). Gary Phillips (President and CEO of Marathon) and Jerry Melnick (CTO of Marathon) dropped by a while ago to bring me up to date on their partnership with Microsoft.
The two companies have decided that software-based fault tolerant computing was something that should be a part of all datacenters, not merely those of the largest organizations. They're working together to provide the technology that makes it possible for IT administrators to apply a selection of a number of availability options to Windows applications without also having to become HA experts.
Microsoft and Marathon Technologies are now offering three levels of availablility including the following:
- Level One: Microsoft Failover Clustering - High availability helps eliminate single points of failure - reducing downtime, guarding against data loss
- Level Two: everRun Component-Level Fault Tolerance – For applications with requirement for little or no downtime, zero data loss
- Level Three: everRun System - Level Fault Tolerance - For the most critical applications with requirement for zero downtime, zero data loss
Today this capability is available for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008-based applications. In the future, this capability will extend to virtual servers hosted in either the Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
Does your organization have a requirement to make applications fault tolerant?