Marathon notes that, "Recent research by IDC shows revenue loss per hour for midsize companies ranges from $60,000 to $1 million, depending on industry. Productivity loss adds another $4,000 to $22,000 per hour...Coleman-Parkes Research also analyzed downtime for organizations over fifty people and found that the average loss per firm is approximately $356,000 per year, and this does not include brand impact or long-term efficiency effects."

"Rather than think about recovering, this is about preventing problems," said ESG's Whitehouse. "Marathon maintains lockstep with a copy, and ensures that the system will not go down. It's not just the investment cost, but also the ongoing operational cost, and costs and trade-offs if there's an event. With prevention, you get to avoid all the associated costs of having downtime -- no need for 'fire drill' practice, no dissatisfaction, no recovery time. That can be huge. I am not aware of any other solution that offers this value based on the investment in the technology, or in terms of amount of IT time required and other associated times from downtime events."

EverRun MX features include full SMP/multi-core fault tolerance and redundant operation across servers, no requirements for application level customization or complex scripting, full automation and it runs on commodity servers. According to Welch, everRun MX works with any 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows currently supported by Microsoft, and any application that runs under them. According to Welch, virtualization is part of everRun MX, "so you can be running dozens of applications." Currently, Marathon supports everRun MX only on Intel systems.

Systems being protected with everRun MX for fault-tolerance can be located next to each other, on different floors, even in different buildings. "It depends on bandwidth and cost," said Welch. "We can synchronously keep systems together up to about 100 miles away."

An everRun MX complete configuration starts under $10,000 with licenses for two systems. Paired systems allow the load be split and shared; everRun MX can also be used to provide N+1 protection (for more than three active servers).

A private cloud can play a key role in your disaster recovery strategy. We dig into the storage, LAN, and WAN requirements to build a cloud for DR. That and more--including articles on automated data centers and SaaS Web security--in the new all-digital issue of Network Computing. Download it here (registration required).