From what we’ve seen, the interest in virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery is driven by two key factors: cost savings and greater demand for 24×7 availability of health records. Like so many organizations in this tough economy, health care providers are under tremendous pressure to deliver the same quality services at lower cost. Using server virtualization for server consolidation can help. And the VMotion and XenMotion capability in VMware and XenServer respectively can provide these organizations with DR that is significantly easier to deploy and execute. On top of XenServer they can add everRun VM for fault tolerant, high availability protection that is much more affordable and practical than what they have had in the past.

Testament of the increased interest in virtualization from healthcare organizations comes from our own experiences here at Marathon. We’ve seen a positive uptake in healthcare customers who are deploying everRun VM to protect their virtual environments. Currently, about 30% of new customers that are in Marathon’s pipeline for sales are in the healthcare related space. We can only assume that the number of healthcare customers we service will continue to grow as we venture into 2009.

The changes these organizations are making are allowing them to stay ahead of the competition as they increase efficiency, ensure the availability of patient records and most importantly set the standard for inpatient and outpatient care.

Are you part of a healthcare organization that is starting to deploy server virtualization? Is more effective HA and DR a key goal?

“The value proposition of using Adobe Flex lies in how we cost-effectively built a rich, elegant user interface that consolidates and simplifies huge amounts of data across complex server environments – positioning our product line even further ahead of the product curve.”- Jerry Melnick, CTO, Marathon

See the complete case study on Adobe’s site here.

Real-time reporting provider Inova Solutions, along with new partner Marathon Technologies, will host a webinar to discuss best practices for business continuity and high availability in the contact center. Presenter Scott Thompson from Marathon Technologies will discuss how to protect your real-time reporting investment from costly downtime and data loss.

Participants can register for the webinar here. Details are below:

What: Webinar: “Assessing the Impact of Planned and Unplanned Downtime in the Contact Center”
When: Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 2:00 pm EST

via Inova Solutions website.

When Exchange 2007 is run in a virtual server environment each role can be implemented as a separate virtual machine. Individual services can be easily matched to resource requirements by selecting the number and location of the virtual machines implementing each service to be started. The number, location and configuration of these virtual machines can be dynamically adjusted as usage requirements change over time. Infrastructure components that support the Exchange environment, including Active Directory, DNS and DHCP that have traditionally required separate servers and distinct availability solutions, can now be implemented as virtual machines in a common resource pool and leverage the common availability solution that is used to address the entire virtualization environment.

Virtualization also makes disaster recovery easier to implement, more effective and less costly. Virtual machines separate the software configuration from the underlying hardware. This provides total flexibility in the hardware required for the disaster site. One set of hardware can provide disaster backup for multiple applications and cost effective configurations can be chosen strictly based on their disaster recovery role. Software configurations change over time and changes must be duplicated at the disaster site to ensure proper operation. This can be extremely time consuming and error prone in a physical environment. In a virtual environment, the configuration is contained within the virtual machine definition file. Simply copying this file to the disaster site is all that is needed to maintain configuration compatibility.

So how many of you have made the important step to moving to Exchange 2007? If you haven’t deployed 2007 yet, are you planning to? We would love to hear from you. If you have a minute, please take the poll to the left and tell us your plans. If you deployed it, are you taking advantage of the virtualization benefits? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts.

LEVEL 1: BASIC FAILOVER WITH XENSERVER HA
The first level of availability, basic failover and recovery, is appropriate for applications where recovery is not absolutely critical, and where manual intervention, while not desirable, is acceptable. These may include infrastructure applications or dev and test systems.
XenServer HA provides:

LEVEL 2: COMPONENT-LEVEL FAULT TOLERANCE WITH everRun VM
For applications with business-critical roles, everRun VM provides component-level fault tolerance: the ability to withstand the loss of an individual network or storage component without interruption or downtime.
The attributes of Level-2 availability include:

LEVEL 3: SYSTEM-LEVEL FAULT TOLERANCE WITH everRun VM AND LOCKSTEP OPTION
For the most mission-critical systems, Marathon everRun VM with Lockstep Option provides system-level fault tolerance, with continuous availability in the face of component or system-wide failures. Level 3 will be available in 2009 and offers protection for systems that cannot experience any downtime and must maintain transaction state at all costs. everRun VM with Lockstep Option offers all of the benefits of everRun VM (Level 2), together with:

For more information on the different levels of availability please visit here.

Did anyone have a chance to see this demo live? What did you think?

Connecting Employees, Vendors and Customers Without Interruption

A large U.S. furniture retailer was becoming increasingly dependent on Microsoft Exchange 2003 for internal communication and collaboration, and for communication with both vendors and customers. Since the retailers primary revenue-generating activities relied on e-mail, downtime would have resulted in serious consequences. As a result, Exchange protection became a requirement and top priority for senior leaders.

everRun –An Alternative to Clustering

The IT staff had previous experience with traditional clustering and was looking for an easier, more robust solution. They selected everRun and implemented a solution using a pair of IBM servers with local boot disks and a fibre channel SAN for the datastore. Currently, the system supports close to 1200 users.

No Exchange Failures = Increased Competitive Advantage

In over a year of operation, they have not experienced a single unplanned disruption of their Exchange system. In turn, this has allowed them to keep their revenue-generating activities operating at full speed. As a result, they are currently looking at adding the everRun SplitSite option to allow geographical separation of their systems for additional protection.

Do you have a story when protecting Exchange would have been a better option than what resulted? How did it affect you or your company?

Q: What happens in a case of a split brain scenario?

Jerry: In our SplitSite products, we have what we call a quorum services capability – it’s actually an additional component that’s added on to manage split brain and arbitrate when you lose all connections between the two machines.

Q: How long does it generally take to set up XenServer with everRun VM to create this kind of a solution?

Jerry: Citrix people have always mentioned “Ten minutes to Xen” which is a pretty good rule of thumb. We say it’s another ten minutes to add the Marathon software. It’s a simple script that gets run on each host, and then you’re off and ready to protect the machines. The actual protection process itself is really a matter of a minute. The simplicity and ease have never been seen before in this industry with this class of availability solution.

Q: In field of limitations and customers that have deployed this kind of technology, are there any things you would council people to consider to set up XenServer and everRun in the most highly available and robust way?

Jerry: With our system, we provide best practice guidelines for configuring networks availability, etc. One of the beauties of our technology – working in conjunction with XenServer – is that once everything is installed and running, we put everything into an active validation mode so that we know components are configured properly. If something is misconfigured or isn’t running redundantly, you’re going to see the status and receive a warning. A key benefit of this system is you will know how to fix it before there are any problems.

There are many cases in availability systems where you have simple failover technologies: you take an error, you failover, you get to that resource, and then you find out the network or disk isn’t working because it wasn’t configured properly. By having this active validation capability and the report out, the status is being monitored in a simple and reliable fashion – you know when you’re redundant and how you’re going to manage failures.

Thanks to everyone that attended. For those that didn’t have the chance to attend or ask questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section and we will do our best to answer them.

The webinar will begin promptly at 11:30 a.m. EDT, so if you haven’t yet registered you can do so here.

For those that can’t attend, we will be posting the Q&A following the event.