InformationWeek

September 29, 1997

Marathon Technologies: Fail-Proof NT Servers

company focused on innovative Windows NT capabilities could eventually be risking complacency. With NT now the operating system IS executives choose so they don't lose their jobs, a company is allowed to wonder how it could possibly miss. World conquest on the coattails of Microsoft is a distinct possibility. But is there another way?

Don't count on complacency from Marathon Technologies Corp. The company's Endurance 4000 product set consists of a PCI board and software that snap into any server running NT. Endurance duplicates execution and processing on multiple systems at the same time to make sy stem failure transparent to application users. More important, once the product is in place, Marathon guarantees that the customer will lose absolutely no data for all NT applications on servers and clusters. The list price for such fault tolerance-more advanced than NT itself-is $25,000.

Many of the Boxborough, Mass., company's prospective customers are IT shops that haven't already installed NT. For that reason, its sales cycle takes a bit longer than complacency would allow. "I can't just say, `You're running NT with your pants down, now just snap in this cluster system to protect your data,'" says Joost Verhofstad, Marathon's VP of business development.

In fact, this fall Marathon is improving Endurance's performance. "We lost performance for some applications because of separating compute and I/O," says Verhofstad. "So we're tuning the software and the communications packet."

Marathon was co-founded in 1993 by Robert Glorioso, now the company's president and CEO, and Richard Fiorentino, it s VP of engineering. Between them, they bring decades of experience with fault-tolerant and clustering solutions. While Tandem and Stratus are long-time fault-tolerant vendors bringing their expertise to NT, industry watchers say that no other vendor can match the low price and ease of installation that Marathon offers. "Endurance does what Marathon says it does," says Richard Fichera, VP of research at the Giga Information Group. "There's a class of people waiting for Marathon who got into NT and didn't know what they were getting into. Now that they have an Exchange server out there, they worry about what to do if it goes down."

At least one Exchange customer says Endurance works for hardware fault tolerance. "We're putting Marathon on our Exchange server because Exchange is a widely used, critical application," says Sushil Vyas, assistant VP of the technical division for First Union Capital Market in Charlotte, N.C. "Endurance is a nice product, and I hope it catches on."

Still, Vyas wonders how well Marathon will do when Microsoft's own Cluster Server capabilities mature. "Marathon offers good hardware fault tolerance," he says, "but if there's a software problem, we may as well lose the machine anyway."

Analyst Fichera says Marathon's greatest challenge will be in fending off Tandem, now a unit of Compaq Computer. Ultimately, though, he thinks the vendor will find a niche. Marathon won't release its sales figures, but analysts estimate them to be in the range of $3.4 million. "They're still burning investment capital and a long way from cash-stable, but they won't have trouble attracting more money," Fichera says. "Marathon won't be a billion-dollar company, but they'll possibly be a $100 million company."

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