Marathon Unveils Low Cost Server Fault Tolerance

Marathon Technologies announced Tuesday availability of its everRun MX software, which helps small to midsize businesses affordably ensure uptime for applications running on on-premises Windows servers.

Most of today's server hardware has multi-core CPUs, and many servers are configured for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Marathon claims that everRun MX is "the industry's first software-based fault tolerant solution for SMP and multi-core servers and applications." Fault tolerance, according to Marathon, eliminates risks associated with restarts of systems and of virtual machines and data recovery. The high-availability software vendor claims that, previously, fault-tolerance for Windows appliances was available only on a single processor, not multi-core; IT would have to default back to high-availability, use an expensive system or run the risk of downtime.

"Providing full fault tolerance, especially in software, for SMP, including multi-core architectures, is a very big deal," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "A lot of applications have gotten processor-hungry, they can exploit multiple cores and they're often mission-critical."

For small to midsize businesses, according to Jim Welch, president and chief executive officer, Marathon Technologies, uses for everRun MX include front-office applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server.

By running on two or more machines, everRun MX provides fault-tolerance, meaning that a problem on one box will not stop or interrupt an application. According to Marathon, this eliminates IT risks associated with system/VM restarts and data recovery. "All the complexity of management is hidden," said Welch. "We make the two systems look like one, for example, for software installs and patches... we keep the systems in synch, so it can failover seamlessly, users don't have to re-login."

"IT folks don't like disaster recovery," said Jim Welch, president and chief executive officer, Marathon Technologies. "It's expensive when you need to use it. EverRun MX lets them bring local availability."