In the vehicle manufacturing industry, companies want an efficient and economical way to ensure smooth operation of all servers, software and applications. Any instance of unscheduled downtime could lead to a loss of data, or in a worst case scenario, to a complete disruption of production and services.

Serve customer needs online without interruption

One European vehicle manufacturer, who understands the importance of protection against downtime, has been using Marathon solutions since 2000. As their security needs as an organization have grown, so has their relationship with Marathon. They began by using the Endurance 4000 system to help protect their forklift management system. Three years later, they upgraded to everRun FT to further safeguard files and applications and to ensure continuous server availability.

The implementation of everRun FT gave the company the opportunity to undertake other IT projects to maximize efficiency and reliability. They were able to establish a centralized network to allow the entire staff to access all applications and system updates remotely.

Defend 24/7 operations with Marathon everRun FT software

With these new initiatives in place, one company executive says that it is now more important than ever for applications and servers to be accessible 24/7 – no matter what. “A disruption to the provision of data and applications would affect every employee, and in the worst case scenario, halt operations altogether,” said the executive.

The company uses both Marathon’s everRun FT and SplitSite to allow two servers to operate simultaneously in 100 percent lock-step. SplitSite provides an additional layer of protection against larger scale failures and disasters. This means that the two servers create a single virtual environment and if one fails, no downtime will occur and all software, applications and data will continue to run on the remaining server.

The organization utilizes several levels of security, including a single server, a Windows cluster, and a Marathon System, but all of their most important and mission-critical applications are operated on everRun FT.

Elimination of system failure and increased competitive advantage

Any instance of unscheduled downtime would impact not only the company’s main factory, but also their several hundred other outlets. If an employee was unable to connect to the network because the server was down, all data on customers and products would become unavailable – this could mean a stall on productivity and unhappy customers. The company executive maintains that this is no longer a concern, thanks to Marathon. “With everRun FT, we no longer have to worry about downtime.”

We all like to think that we will be prepared in the event of an emergency, or a disaster. Hospitals exist if we fall sick; fire stations surround us if flames break loose; we are constantly preparing so if a catastrophe strikes, we are ready.

Preparing for a system’s disaster is no different. However, how to go about preparing for an event like this can be confusing. There are many options out there when it comes to protecting your system, each best suited for specific requirement. Unfortunately, many vendors use terms like disaster recovery and high availability interchangeably to describe their solutions when in fact they are usually designed for one or the other.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the way to recover applications and from a system failure. DR is a reactive solution where if a failure occurs, IT relocates the data, builds the system over, and brings everything back up to working order. This takes time, a precious commodity that typically businesses relying on critical applications don’t have. In addition, recovering applications could bring about a number of side effects which you really don’t want to endure every time some minor failure happens.

But what if I could tell you that instead of worrying about how to recover from a computer system failing, you could simply prevent it from occurring at all?

Disaster tolerance (DT) is a proactive way to prevent system failure from impacting application and data availability. A disaster tolerant solution isn’t going to recover the data if there’s a disaster. Instead it will tolerate the fault if a disaster occurs – keeping an organization’s critical applications up and running at all times. It is not recovery, but rather prevention. And with solutions like our everRun SplitSite, separate servers don’t even need to be in the same building – they can be up to 100 miles apart with fault-tolerant protection between the two locations.

DR solutions are good for applications that can afford some downtime while you recover them. But for essential applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, which need to be available all the time, disaster tolerance is often the best way to go.

So what combination of DT and DR protection would work best for your company’s applications?

A research report by IDC’s virtualization guru, John Humphreys, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation highlights the fact that the automatic restart used by most high availability solutions for virtualization fails to deliver what most customers really want and need. Here is what John has to say:

“To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market are “blind from the waist up.” That is, they do not know what is happening inside the virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering application services most care to know.”

If you would like to learn more about high availability for virtualization, how to get application-level awareness and what that can buy you, we encourage you to join the webinar Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 EST. with John Humphreys (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon).

For more information or to register visit here.

Do you know what capacity of your server is currently being utilized by your organization? No? Well you should. If you can recognize where the gaps in your current server environments are, then it’s easier to analyze the potential savings and opportunities for deploying green technology.

Each year on average an organizations data center only outputs 10-15% of its total processing capacity. By deploying a virtualization strategy, organizations can raise their hardware use to 70-80% resulting in a much more efficient use of corporate capital.

We’ve seen for quite some time now that executives are still iffy on whether or not to deploy a virtualization strategy. For the most part they understand the benefits: reducing energy expenditures, consolidating physical server space, decreasing their environmental footprint, etc. What seem to be the common causes for concern are the effects suffered during the deployment – fear of data loss and the possibility of downtime.

If VARs introduce their customers to high availability technology, such as everRun VM, and offer it alongside their virtualization solutions, then customers will increase their willingness to virtualize their applications – knowing they will be protected from downtime and data loss.

This week, Steve Keilen, VP of Marketing for Marathon, discussed the green side of everRun with eWeek Channel Insider and how it has aided VARs.

What green strategies does your organization currently have in place to maximize productivity and cut energy costs?

As demand rises for IT managers and C-level executives to embrace virtualization, we thought it would be worthwhile to share our insights into adopting server virtualization. The tips below are designed to help companies determine if server virtualization is right for them and how they should prepare to ensure a successful initial implementation.

Tip #1 – Make the business case for server virtualization

Before implementing server virtualization, IT executives should assess whether the technology will provide a reasonable return on investment. They should first take a look at how they are using servers today and ask themselves:

• Do they have common applications running on a number of different servers?
• Do they have enough servers that could and should be consolidated? Is the number of applications increasing and the capacity required for the applications continuing to expand?
• Do they expect the number of servers they have to buy each year to increase? If so, by how much?
• Is the business planning to undertake other large-scale technology implementations, and if so, how will this fit with a possible virtualization development?

In short, the IT department has to make a strong business case and justify the virtualization investment to ensure executive management support. To help conduct a quick assessment, ROI calculators are available from VMware and Marathon. Marathon also has a webinar available with John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC, “Making the Business Case for Server Virtualization,” in which John provides essential guidance in making your business case.

Tip #2 – Consider the license and support implications

IT managers need investigate what, if any, impact virtualization will have on their application licenses and support. Depending on the application, the original licensing terms and conditions may no longer apply after the applications have been migrated to the virtualized environment. In addition, it may be that the providers of some of the software applications do not support virtualization systems, and are unwilling to offer technical support for the applications after the migration to a virtualized environment.

Tip #3 – Afford to spend the time to plan

As any IT professional knows, implementing a new system requires dedicated resources, budget and time. Industry experts have estimated that the planning stage constitutes 90% of a virtualization implementation project. The actual migration is relatively simple to undertake provided that the implementation has been well-planned. Any system information to be migrated should be collated and backed-up up to six months before the start of the migration. IT managers should remember to assess how much hardware each virtual machine needs in order to operate efficiently. They also need to ensure that the number of virtual environments residing in a single hardware does not sprawl out of control - this could have serious consequences on the stability of the environment and application availability. A thorough implementation plan will help businesses minimize any hiccups that might arise.

Tip #4 – Assess levels of application availability and risk to business continuity

Despite the many benefits of virtualization, businesses are beginning to realize that there are risks associated with the technology. While virtualization is useful for protecting applications from planned downtime, protecting virtual environments from unplanned downtime is a different matter. Today, the cost of just a few minutes of unplanned downtime can be hugely detrimental and with virtual environments the risk is greater because server consolidation often results in a single point of failure for multiple applications. Businesses should therefore consider a solution that combines virtualization technology with the high availability protection necessary to keep the business going through disruptions.

Tip #5 – Demonstrate that virtualization won’t impact end users

After the implementation, it is critical to demonstrate to executive management that virtualization can be accomplished without hindering applications performance and without diminishing service to end users. IT managers should monitor closely the performance of initial deployments, and if necessary, modify hardware and networking configurations to ensure that the virtual environment is completely transparent to end-users.

Emerging virtualization technologies are opening doors by removing existing barriers of entry such as cost and complexity. More and more businesses of different sizes are starting to reap the benefits of server virtualization. But, before embarking on a virtualization project, organizations should assess their needs carefully, choose the right technology, make sure the implementation doesn’t impact end user performance - and start small.

If you have additional tips or recommendations that have helped you and your organization successfully deploy server virtualization, please leave a comment here and join the discussion!

This past Monday millions of BlackBerry users were hindered with email downtime for three hours due to the company’s second major outage in less than a year. Customers immediately jumped into online discussions and on blogs like here and here to find the root of the problem. The outage is believed to have been caused by the failure of one of two Internet addresses that relay e-mail from corporate servers. Jack Gold, a technology analyst from J.Gold Associates stated something we are very familiar with:

“Any time you got a system that’s got a NOC, a Network Operations Center, you have the potential for a single point of failure.”

A great point Gold raises (where our expertise in high-availability comes into play) is that if a company isn’t able to have enough redundancy in the NOC, then why don’t they have a technology in place to make sure there isn’t a single point of failure?

There’s no way of knowing how much business was lost for BlackBerry or BlackBerry cell phone carriers during the downtime; however one thing is for sure, if RIM had implemented a fault tolerant solution, then “routine upgrades” would not create such a fiasco amongst customers.

Hopefully they recognized this mishap as a lessoned learned.

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!

One of the most common causes for concern we hear from our customers when evaluating virtualization technology for their organization is “What is the return on investment?” To address this concern, we’ve created a Virtualization and Application Availability ROI Calculator. The idea was to create a simple tool that helps decision makers get a quick assessment of virtualization’s potential impact on their organization. With that being said we want ROI calculator users to:

• Discover what your direct benefits could be from server consolidation with Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition v4
• Learn how much you could save by protecting productivity and business critical work loads with XenServer and everRun VM
• Develop a worst case scenario to see what happens if your benefits are lower – and costs are higher – than you anticipated

If you want to see some examples of the cost of downtime for specific industries, take a look at this post where our CTO, Jerry Melnick, discusses Marathon’s footprint in virtualization and high availability with Citrix’ Barry Flanagan.

Today, Shahid Shah, author of The Healthcare IT Guy blog, posted an article written by our own Joost Verhofstad, Director of Healthcare Solutions. To give you a quick overview, the article discusses the growing need and demand for safeguarding critical patient information to ensure that unplanned system downtime never comes between patients and their healthcare needs. Here is an excerpt:

“What is the single most reason given by Healthcare IT Administrators for improving IT infrastructure? Without question, Patient Care tops every list, followed closely by federal regulations and costs. With the rise in government mandated regulations such as HIPAA, identifying ways to encourage widespread use of electronic data interchange has resulted in a surge of activity within healthcare organizations from hospitals to pharmaceutical organizations looking for ways to streamline processes that improve patient care and reduce risk. In today’s world, it is imperative that no patient ever has to wait to receive care; especially not as a result of paperwork or technology issues.”

Take a look at the post and leave any feedback you might have, or if you are interested in case studies from some of our clients in the Healthcare industry, please let us know and we would be happy to share them with you.

Last week we were having a discussion with a customer and the topic “What does your office do when there is system downtime” came up. We thought this would be a great opportunity to start a meme and tell you what the top five most creative things we have heard of occurring in an office during downtime:

1. 
   Desk Chair 500 – This should be self explanatory, but just in case, it’s racing around the office on a desk chair with wheels (partner for pushing optional)
2. Office Mini Golf - Creating obstacles in and around the office and enjoying a round of nine with co-workers
3. Trading Spaces (the cubicle version) – Covering a co-workers entire cubicle and stationary tools in newspaper
4. Peanut Pack Pool – Filling a co-workers office or cubicle with peanut packing foam
5. Keyboard Shuffle – Rearranging the keys on a co-workers keyboard so it no longer represents the QWERTY style it once did

To your employees, the cause of system downtime is irrelevant and distracting. Whether the downtime was planned or unplanned, it’s tough to fault employees when they look for entertainment to pass the time. No matter what the cause of downtime is in your organization, it can be prevented with availability software. Tell us how your work place is affected by downtime.

Dugie, Alex, and Michel, you guys seem to cover availability quite a bit so we thought you might want to take a stab at this. Enjoy!