Twas the night before Christmas and all through the warehouse not a computer was working not even the mouse (OK we’ll stop there)….While everyone else is sipping on “spiked” egg nog and enjoying a hearty Christmas meal, we at Marathon are working to ensure that children worldwide are met with rewards for their yearly good behavior. Here’s the “official” press release for your enjoyment:

X December 2007— Saint Nick Enterprises (SNE) today announces the results of a new implementation using Marathon Technologies’ business continuity software. The technology has enabled SNE, the world’s busiest toy manufacturing and delivery business, to attain less than one hour’s downtime in the past 365 days.

SNE CEO, Santa Claus, employs 2,500 full-time elves at its company headquarters in Lapland to supply its multi-billion customer base from over xxx countries globally. As such, the company relies on the maximum possible number of operating-days per annum to avoid delivery disappointments.

Saint Nick Enterprises is using Marathon everRun FT to protect the IT infrastructure of its gift factory and global distribution centre. everRun FT is providing fault-tolerance across the SNE mission-critical document management system, for letter registry. This ensures that letters and other communications received are forwarded for processing to Claus’ helpers, who assess each child’s wishes against whether they have been well-behaved in the past 12 months. Since implementing everRun FT, the letter registration system, gift factory and distribution centre have suffered no downtime at all.

Claus, also known as Père Noël and Father Christmas around the world, comments, “We need to be able to not only produce quality toys, but also ensure that all presents are delivered on time to children and child-minded adults around the world. That is why it is absolutely crucial that our IT systems won’t let us down during the busiest time of the year in the lead up to Christmas.”

All data is also safeguarded by Marathon’s continuous data protection tool, everRun CDP, which captures and replicates data on children and their Christmas wish lists in real-time, allowing elves to quickly and simply roll back and recover information from any point in time in case of a catastrophic failure.

To protect other important systems from disruptions, including the automated reindeers’ Nourishment Satisfaction Platform (NSP), SNE uses everRun HA high-availability technology. In the six months that the technology has been in place, the NSP has achieved 99.9 per cent availability, ensuring that the world famous high-performance delivery system, led by Rudolph and his team, have not missed a single meal because of unplanned downtime.

Marathon SplitSite provides a further level of protection for the factory. even if the entire site fails, all IT systems will remain operational on a remote site located approximately 100 miles from the main site, in the north-eastern corner of Lapland. Claus comments: “Mrs Claus is an avid baker but on occasion, she does forget to turn off all the industrial cooking machinery. A few weeks ago after having spent hours preparing hundreds of mice pies for the elves, she went to bed having left the oven on. The whole kitchen and many nearby rooms, including our server room, went up in flames. But thanks to SplitSite, operations in the factory were not disrupted for even a second.”

Nick Turnbull, Director of Sales, Marathon Technologies, adds: “Any application downtime would be disastrous for Saint Nick Enterprises. If data was lost, Mr Claus might deliver the wrong presents to the children: well-behaved children might not receive any presents, or badly-behaved children might get the best toys. Any such mistake would not only ruin Christmas for millions of families around the world but also severely compromise Santa’s reputation.”

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Marathon!